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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