Rune wrote:

> I've been very much a POV purist. My animation attempts with AL the Alien
> proves that. Despite that I've come to the conclusion that doing character
> animation *completely* within POV-Ray *is* a waste of time. That is, if
> you're not satisfied with blobby toons, unsmooth joints etc.

Organic shapes of any kind are far, far, easier to do with a modeler
than with hand-written SDL.

Case in point:  The green aliens in my April 2004 entry would have taken
weeks to create using hand-edited SDL code.  Using the modeler I've
developed, I generated the model in only a couple hours.  This enabled
me to move on to other portions of the work.

It's true that the aliens ride floating carts which are done in SDL,
but SDL *is* good for some things.

SDL can procedurally generate a small subset of organic shapes, such as
trees.  The petrified trees that appear in most of my Rusty animations
were generated this way, but I *never* let the camera get close enough
to reveal how little detail they have; the limbs and trunks are eight-
sided prisms, with smoothed normals, and there are only three different
trees (each being copied many hundreds of times).

It's also true that all the time Greg has spent trying to get a decent
human from SDL has probably resulted in development of some useful
scripting techniques.  Whether this is worth the immense amound of time
invested is another matter.

I'm reminded of some of Howard Day's stuff.  Instead of doing procedural
textures, he simply rendered an silhouette of the model, used a paint
program on the resulting image, and then made the image into an
image_map and applied it to the model.  He'd probably still be getting
some of the textures right if he'd stuck with SDL, but instead he was
able to devote more time to the ticky parts of the work.

Regards,
John

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