"Gilles Tran" <tra### [at] inapginrafr> wrote in message
news:394### [at] inapginrafr...
> Just went to the POV-Ray page looking for links, and it happens to have
> a new design !
> It looks like it's still a work in progress. I hope that there will be
> new things in the "under construction pages".
> First remarks:
> - It certainly loads faster (javascript gone) which is better.
> - I'm not too happy with the colours which are a tad dark, and with the

I'd rather the colours were a little too dark than too bright - the orange
background of the previous site wasn't that great IMHO.

> Poser girl, which I find too Poseresque (that hair, ahem..) and not a
> good demo for the mapping abilities that should be in Povray 3.5.

Why has everyone leapt on her so much? (if you'll excuse the expression ;)
She shows how a natural looking object can be rendered by POV, and made to
look reasonably realistic.  Assuming the site is made to appeal to ~new~
visitors (we all know what POV can do, so it hardly matters what they put on
the package;) then this ability to reproduce something seen in real life
(erm, assuming they don't spend a little too long at the computer ;) would
be impressive.  Just using something like a teapot doesn't give quite the
same effect - I'm not quite sure why, but maybe it's because it's already
man-made in the first place.
ok, some people might argue that it shouldn't be there as it's obvious it
hasn't been hand-coded in POV script - but there are plenty of other images
on the site that have, and many new visitors aren't really going to be too
bothered by this - to them, it's simply an impressive image and so another
reason to get interested in POV.
I also think it adds a welcome "casual" feel - that POV isn't always used
for serious images... sure, some people might think (quite rightly) that a
women dressed somewhat sparingly in leopard-skin is a little cheesy... but
what's the problem with a bit of light-heartedness?  Showing new visitors an
accurately modelled isosurface of a complex function doesn't quite get the
"tell me more" factor going (for, erm, some people anyway).
As a final little point, the suggestion of scrapping her in place of a
spaceship (hand coded in real pov script) seems to reinforce the slightly
stereotypical view some people may have of computer modellers... ;)

Matt

Post a reply to this message