Stefan Viljoen wrote:
> Hmm... never thought of it like that. I've used it a little bit and find it
> mostly useful and easy for constructing simple, odd geometry that would be
> hard or impossible (for me) to do with Pov code. 

Yeah. It's actually not too bad in the drag-around-the-vertecies kind of 
development.

 > But its textures and
> materials system I find -extremely- confusing and hard to understand. 

Yep. I think the real trick is that it doesn't really target the procedural 
texture stuff at all. It *wants* you to take photographs and slap them on 
there - that works well!

> Never
> mind the "NLA" editor, and the real hard-core stuff like rigging and
> animation is completely indecipherable. 

It really wasn't too bad. But again, it doesn't seem to target that. 
Hash:Animation Master, for example, does a much better job with rigging and 
assigning vertecies and handling skin deformation and lip sync and stuff 
like that. (Not that H:AM has usable documentation either, mind. Even the 
help files are generations out of date with the software, let alone the 
printed text it comes with.)

> But then, I've not really invested
> REAL time (years) to get to learn all of that. 

It doesn't take years to get the basics. I did the stuff on my youtube 
channel (dnew) in just a few days of screwing around with it and following 
the tutorials. It literally took me longer to find decent documentation than 
it did to get comfortable with the elementary workings of the program by 
following the documentation.

Not that it looks good, mind, but that's my lack of artistic rather than my 
lack of ability to manipulate the program.

But the cloth sim sucks, the fluid sim is broken, the character animation 
stuff sucks compared to H:AM, the materials suck compared to POV, the Python 
interface is broken, etc.  It tries to do everything, and does it all 
half-assed.

Nevertheless, it actually does manage to do half an ass of everything, so I 
really wish it would be easier to learn for when I want to put together a 
walk-thru thru a textured building with moving lighting or something.

> it was basically core contributors that
> did that, and were real hard-core blend-heads.

Yeah, it's always easier to get good output from a program when you say "I 
need fur, so I will implement exactly what I need."  I think that's how half 
the features got in there, which is why they're all so half-assed. They only 
work well enough to generate the output the author needed at the moment. 
Mind, nothing wrong with that in FOSS; it just makes it less useful to *me*, 
because I'm not willing to contribute the time it would take to fix it.

It's a shame all the free and cheap modelers and animation packages only 
either handle a small portion of the job or suck so hard at a broad base of 
things. I'd love to play around with animations, but I can't justify 
thousands of dollars for software to fiddle around.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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