Rune wrote:

> "Warp" wrote:
> >   I don't understand the idea behind this. I don't think
> > many people look at the source code in IRTC entries either.
>
> I must say I don't find the concept particularly compelling either.
>
> I don't really care if the source code of a nice image is 5 lines or 500
> lines of code...

OK fair enough.  Perhaps especially not a good idea to dilute the effort at
this point. I shall however ramble as to why I find this intriguing.

Someone once won the Corel World Design Contest using a vector art program
to make a stunning image of Heddy Lamar, the goddess/ actress/ sonar
physicist.   They took a bitmap image of her at super high resolution and
then made a separate vector object for every group of pixels of every shade
of grey in the image. Tons of work, a stunning image, but  not much to say
about what CorelDraw! is capable of. In the "real world" of commercial art,
sometimes you might have to do this to sell the painting or to impress the
customer (or simply please yourself!), but that misplaced effort didn't make
this graphic arts hobbyist want to run out to buy the next upgrade.  The
more I learned about that image the more disgusted I was with the judges,
especially when there was no compilation CD that year (IIRC).

When I would visit my local computer sale shows, I would always study
closely all the costly software packages ($89 to $$$$$) that claimed to be
able to to 3D.  The cover art often intrigued me, but I'd often ask myself,
"Did this image take a team a manyear to produce?"  Were the objects therein
made by some expensive 3-D laser scan?   If I got the sense that it did, God
Bless 'Em, but I aint' gonna use this image as evidence of what the software
can do, probably not even buy it.

There *is* stunning art out there which involves sophisticated use of a
modeller.  But it IMHO is not a Poster Child for Povray.  This question does
get back to that old debate (always under the table, mind you) of "what is
povray?"  Is it a professional tool for getting exhaustively, exhaustively
photorealistic lighting and texturing on objects modelled in other packages,
or is it something more wonderful-- a toy?

No, I'm not saying I want pov 5.0 to come with built-in blobmen or
Bryce-like instant mountains. But I think the real pov-evangelization
opportunities come in demonstrating what can be done with very little code,
with TEXT TYPING, mind you!  The industry doesn't even know we exist: the
book Digital Character Animation says something like, "Whether you use an
ink pen or a mouse to create the character...."

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