Sorry Lance,
I feel I struck a nerve. I did not intend to down-play the power and
features of Max. It is very clear that Max is very powerful and that is made
more evident by the number of Games, Movies, etc. it is used in.

What I was trying to point out is that POV is a very powerful render in its
own right and I just feel that POV can go toe-to-toe (based solely on my
observation) in a lot of areas that the expensive professional packages
compete. The article I found reinforced that idea too. So, the heart of what
I am curious about is why would someone be motivated to pay a sum of money,
for a App that the same imagery can be done in a freeware program. I guess
it's an issue of "bang for the buck".
I wonder, how many graphic artist and animators use POV on a professional
level. Do the pros use Lightwave, Max, and the others because they are
better at the output? Is it the productivity issue? or are these commercial
packages forced on the artist (thanks for joining our graphics team, we use
productX, go get 'em.)?


My comment about the middle ball, "being a blob", was to indicate how it
could be made in POV.
for a general example
blob {
        threshold .8
        sphere { <0,0,0> .4, 1 translate x*3 }
        sphere { <0,0,0> .4, 1 translate x*3 rotate <0,1,0> }
        sphere { <0,0,0> .4, 1 translate x*3 rotate <0,2,1> }
        etc...
        pigment { Red }
        normal { crackle .5 scale .5 turbulence .5 }
        finish { SilverFinish }
}

... repeating the spheres in the blob and rotating them all over should give
the general chucky effect, the normal will breakup the smooth surface, and
the finish will make the surface features better defined.
Note I would have to play with the type of normal, pigment ( maybe use a
texture instead), threshold and strength values but it should be very close
to the center ball in the Max scene.

I re-read the article and had mis-quoted it. The reference the  plug-in was
for LightWave not Max, sorry.

"The wool seat covers in LightWave can't create realistic looking metal
without expensive plugins or hours of tweaking the specularity/reflectivity
sliders."

Regards,
C.J. - POV User

Lance Birch <-> wrote in message news:39937d4e@news.povray.org...
> My point was that the renderer is capable of a lot more than it's given
> credit for.
>
> More I was aiming at showing that despite what seems to be common opinion
> around here, MAX has a wonderful renderer that produces great quality
images
> and animations.
>
> As for the middle ball, the effect isn't a blob and couldn't be created
(at
> least not quickly) with one.  It's a procedural displacement map applied
to
> a sphere (which I've then used a derivative of as the diffuse color map,
the
> self-illumination map and then again on the shininess strength map so the
> dark parts aren't as shiny as the red/orange parts).
>
> Also what I was trying to show was that MAX has a very powerful material
> editor, one capable of producing a huge range of different texture types
*by
> default*.  There's no need to add any plugins.  I guess if you really
wanted
> to, you can write you're own plugins too, with some knowledge of C++ (MAX
> Professional comes with a huge library and reference manual on creating
> plugins for all types of things in MAX, from objects, to materials, to
> renderers, new lighting models, basically anything).
>
> Anyway, if you want you can redo the scene, I'll get some co-ords for the
> spheres and lights.  The camera has a fair few properties that you'll have
> to translate into POV-Ray's camera model (for example in MAX you give the
> field of view as an angle or mm measurement, I'm not sure how this will
> translate to POV-Ray exactly).
>
> --
> Lance
>
> The Zone
> http://come.to/the.zone
>
>

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