Darren New wrote:
> Chris Cason wrote:
> 
>> Well the first issue is that we need to get a written release of 
>> permission,
>> plus if the work is based on another work, that needs permission, etc 
>> etc ...
> 
> 
> I was thinking, when I saw the short-code contest announcement, that it 
> would be cool to see a "texture" contest. One submits a texture, be it 
> wood, stone, leaves, water, skin, hair, whatever, in a fairly simple 
> scene, self-contained, not unlike Tek's recent "artistic water".
> 
> I'm not sure how good an idea this is, but I thought it would be a cool 
> way to showcase POV, showing off its strengths relative to more 
> model-oriented renderers.
> 
The caveate, I think, is that textures are not so autonomous.  There 
success depends significantly on context, expecially lighting, but also 
the objects, their scale etc.  Sometimes a texture effect requires 
finish parameters that are quite extreme and work in conjunction with 
the whole scene

Example:
Back in the day I once showed this picture
http://oz.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/1998-10-31/danocean.jpg
to someone I worked with to demonstrate the power of POV-Ray.  The 
response I got was:  "It looks like hardened lava"  Well yeah, I does 
look like hardened lava but it also looks like a photo of water under a 
plausible set of circunstances like low light, from a moving ship, and a 
slow shutter speed, etc.  The picture reminded me much of WWII naval 
photographs in fact.   So I thought it was very good and real, but I was 
also applying a somewhat forgiving "eye" to the result.

I believe this is also the reason why the attempt to collect texture 
examples at povwiki met with only limited success.  It is very difficult 
to buuild a texture that will work universally whatever the context it 
is put into.

So such a contest would be interesting, but I think this dependency 
issue would need to be addressed or else I could see the thing leading 
to frustration.

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