Mitchell,

I am usually just a lurker on this group, but with the reception you have been
getting on here lately, I just had to speak up.

The Waite group books I remember were all excellent. Period.

Obviously, there would be interest in a new book.  Not to discount the idea of
doing some market research, but why don't you follow your own instincts about
what to include in your book.  They are your ideas, it would be your book, and
if you continue in your tradition of excellence, it will be a good book.  I
think (I say with my asbestos underwear on) that everybody currently pitching
criticism your way should just hold their comments and wait for your new book
(if there will be one) to come out.  It will speak for itself.

Respectfully,

    Randy Hawley


Mitchell Waite wrote:

> Some people say that the POV Ray SDL is a turn off for new users, others say
> that modeling programs are a turn off to scripters There seems to be a real
> scism here. There are issues with Moray's right handed polor coordinates,
> and some thing sPartch or Hamapatch are a better choce (tho I have not heard
> why they are). When I was speaking of putting Moray text in a gray box I did
> not mean that text would reproduce the user docs in Moray. I don't see my
> book idea as competing with either Moray or POV Ray docs, that would be a
> waste of trees. I want to improve the tutorials, not compete with them. I
> think that the tutorials in the POV Ray and Moray docs are very uneven, some
> are great, some are okay, and some are poor.
>
> I know very little about this other products: blender, spatch, hamapatch,
> anim8tor, amapi, rhino. I have tried blender but it would not run properly
> on my Win2K machine with dual LCD monitors. Are these all freeware programs,
> because the one disconnect with Moray is that its retail product and that
> does not work very well with the free nature of POV. What about including
> some of these products in the gray text, would that be a turn off?
>
> I wonder about the statment "it's impossible to really unleash povray's
> power without learning the scene description language"? How is that true?
> "And some of the coolest povray stuff is not implemented in these modelers
> yet." Well there is SO MUCH stuff in POV Ray that is implemented in these
> modelers that I am not sure a book needs to cover everything in POV Ray,
> that seems like a daunting and almost impossible requirement.
>
> "Furthermore the structure of a book about Moray would should be quite
> different from one about Povray." I don't see how this follows. Why would
> they have to have different structures? Seems like "here is how to do
> something in POV" could easily be parallel with "here is how its done in
> Moray", or whatever modeler you are using.
>
> I very much appreciate the feelback, its helping me calibrate my ideas for
> the team that is forming. Nothing has been decided so this is a great time
> for people to jump in and help shape this project.

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