Am 01.02.2013 05:34, schrieb Sven Littkowski:
> Thanks for all the answers.
>
> By linking to other programs which can do this, it is indirectly admitted that
> it could be possible. How else would otherwise those other programs manage
> that..?
>
> I remember, there was a time POV-Ray's scene code wasn't yet a fully functional
> programming language. Just when the POV-Ray team added the MACRO feature to it,
> it became more than it was up to then. That I have in mind now, too. There are
> ways, so let's forget the limits. Best evidence are all those programs the
> answerers linked to by themselves.
>
> A basic figure would do, for now. It should look like a human, true, but it is
> meant as a placeholder. Something to fill scenes with, to populate them, to make
> them alive. But for anything really professional, still the software of other
> companies might have to be used. I believe, it can be done. Something that looks
> human from a certain distance, some archetype.
>
> I just mean to motivate, to inspire. Not to ignore critics.   :-)

We will /never/ have a hard-coded human figure shape in POV-Ray.

Here's why:

- It has been mentioned before that the geometry of even a simple human 
stand-in would be pretty complicated, and can't be captured by just one 
or two simple mathematical formulae. As a consequence, we would have to 
resort to composing it from other primitives.

- The SDL has all the expressiveness it needs to achieve any possible 
composition of primitives that the rendering engine supports, without 
any rendering speed penalty. Where parameterization is desired, a #macro 
can get you there.

- Hard-coding a human stand-in, rather than defining it via an SDL 
macro, would rob the user of the possibility to modify the figure to 
suit their special needs.

Thus, if ever a human stand-in should find its way into an official 
POV-Ray release it will be in the form of an .inc file. (The same, by 
the way, also goes for shapes of particular fruits.)

Actually that's how other software packages do it as well: Their 
primitives are meshes, deformers, and some such. No human figures in 
there. They are provided instead as external files, which tell them how 
to compose a human model from those meshes, deformers etc.


This leaves us solely with the question why POV-Ray doesn't include a 
human stand-in .inc, and whether it ever will.

To answer this question it is important to note that the human figures 
provided by Poser, DAZ Studio, MakeHuman etc. are designed by 3D 
artists, not software developers.

Now the POV-Ray dev team is a team of software developers. Our software 
development skills far exceed our 3D modeling skills, so that's where we 
invest virtually all of the time we can spare to get POV-Ray forward.

It's not that we wouldn't like to have a mannekin or something like that 
among our standard include files. But I guess such a puppet would 
ultimately have to come from the POV-Ray community, or we'll never have one.

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