news:40479763@news.povray.org...
> What are peoples' thoughts on this.  Who are beginning to experiment
> with mesh tools and what tools are you using?  How do you see them
> fitting in with your style and expressive intentions?

For some time now, most of my images have been basically mesh-based. It
seems to have been a natural evolution.

Until recently, primitive-based modelling had a real superiority over mesh
modelling. For the average POVer with a regular desktop machine, meshes were
just too heavy to handle: a character, tree or car model must be 20-40 Mb
(in mesh2, twice that number in 3.1 mesh) to look good enough at screen
resolution. Smaller meshes, while easier to handle, tend to look ugly due to
the lower poly number.  By comparison, a primitive-based object required
little parsing time and scales up very gracefully (it's always smooth).
Thanks to POV-Ray's amazing number of complex primitives and to its SDL, it
has been possible to create extremely complex images out of primitives.

But now, the current machines have enough RAM to digest gigantic meshes
without complaining so that primitives have become much less competitive.
This is why, for instance, my Maketree objects are no longer interesting,
since we have POV-Tree, which exports in mesh (with a better algorithm) and
allows the creation of entire forests thanks to mesh instanciation.

In some way, the limitations of primitives were like the proverbial elephant
in the middle of the room... There were objects that were impossible or at
least very difficult to represent, so we didn't talk about them :) This
concerns characters, of course, but in fact most objects in the real world
are hard to do right with primitives (or bezier patches) if only because
they have those little rounded edges...
For me, Poser (in 1996) and uv-mapping (in 1999) really opened the door to
mesh use in POV-Ray but it's only recently that I made the jump and started
modelling stuff myself, first in Rhino, then in Wings and now in Cinema4D
(Blender I learned for a week but didn't like enough to continue with it).

The big remaining issue for hobbyists, however, is uv-mapping. AFAIK there
is no free uv-mapping tool allowing real-time 3D painting and some
automatisation for vertex unwrapping (such as the expensive Bodypaint).
Until we have such a tool, mapping will remain a limitation for mesh users.

> Further, commercial software producers seem to understand the role of
> the amateur market in creating a workerpool with software skills.  So
> marketshare there can influence marketshare in the commercial venue.
> This has lead to highend vendors making training versions of these
> powerful products available to the hobbiest community.  What role does
> this leave for POV?

In fact, I'm rather under the impression that commercial software vendors
tend to shun the amateur market, simply because the money is in professional
production, no with the penniless hobbyists. Poser, for instance, is now
sold by the makers of Shade, a Japanese professional 3D software. Xfrog is
no longer a stand-alone product (though the 3.5 version is still available)
but a plug-in for C4D. Accordingly, while POV-Ray images find their way in
magazines and books, articles about POV-Ray are not exactly in high demand.
True, the highend vendors make training versions available, but it's more an
attempt to lure future paying professional users (these versions are
crippled or unusable for final professional work) than to woo hobbyists,
most of whom won't be able to fork over 2000-7000$ for the full version +
the 1000$ plug-ins.  POV-Ray seems relatively safe from this sort of
competition.

G.

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