nemesis wrote:
> Fa3ien <fab### [at] yourshoesskynetbe> wrote:

>>> However, it has always been stressed that povray -- like Renderman, Mental
>>> Ray and other renderers -- deals exclusively with the rendering process.
>> That's a fundamental misconception.  POV-Ray ISN'T a "renderer".
>> POV-Ray is, and has alwas been, a "rendering system", complete out of
>> the box, with the ability to generate scenes through a scripting
>> system (until POV 2.2), then a more complete SDL (from POV 3).
>>
>> With Mental Ray, you can't do that, you need a modeler with an interface
>> to control it.
>>
>> Even with Renderman, you can't created decent scenes with a text file,
>> it totally lacks any feature that would allow text-based modelling.
> 
> renderer, rendering system... what's the difference?  They accept an image
> model as input and produce an image as output, that's all.
> 
> What's the difference if that image model is binary mesh and textures
> format, a compiled C/C++ program or an ASCII textual SDL script model?
> Each has their pros and cons... certainly the SDL appeals to programmers,
> though not much to people used to visual modelling tools.  
One of my applications for POV is in a script I wrote to generate 
transmembrane proteins. Input is a database with for a number of genes 
the transmembrane segments and a user specified number of aminoacids you 
want to highlight (possibly a database of all known mutations). Typical 
use is to create a piece of celmembrane with all known mutations sorted 
by disease in different colors (see attached). ATM I do the processing 
of the databases in Matlab, just because that is most easy for me, and I 
need a little more support for reading files, but I would love to 
convert this into a POV only tool. As you can imagine the fact that POV 
is a scripting language is essential for this application. Also because 
I only generate a gene specific include file, but there are a number of 
switches in the .pov file for various type of output (color, b/w, other 
shapes apart from spheres etc).
I know of no other program that can do this for me in this way. I know 
that I could generate meshes in stead of spheres, curved lines etc, but 
I would not have though about starting such a project. With POV it was 
incredibly easy to conceive and to execute this idea. A couple of people 
have admired my use of shade and reflections in this and other images. I 
am honest enough to tell them that it would be more complicated to 
remove those, but not everybody believes that.
Think about that, there is a whole field of applications that are not 
possible (or totally impractical) without POV. That goes much further 
than personal preferences for command line or GUI interfaces.


> And its more
> true today than at povray's heyday.
> 
> The point is that Renderman and Mental Ray don't come with their own VISUAL
> modeller GUI.  Instead, they ship as plugins for the most common commercial
> Visual Modellers, like Maya or 3DStudioMax... they too, despite backed by
> heavy ammounts of money and developers, chose to do what they do best:
> rendering, leaving visual modelling to others.  Why should povray with its
> limited pool of developers do differently?
> 
As shown above, because it has its own niche.

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