On 1-3-2016 4:38, Jörg 'Yadgar' Bleimann wrote:
> Hi(gh)!
>
> On New Year's Day, I decided for the first time to seriously start with
> a landmark building complex for Kabul, POVghanistan: the Soviet-built
> airport, as it looked like around 1970. So I googled for photos showing
> the airport back then, and found a close-up of the domestic flights
> control tower:
>
http://footage.framepool.com/shotimg/qf/296679019-kabul-international-airport-hand-luggage-tower-airport-kabul-city.jpg
>
>
> Another one from 1969, showing the whole building as seen from the
> airfield: http://www.airports-worldwide.com/img/w/kabul_airport_in_1969.jpg
>
> And attached here is with what I came up after two months... pathetic,
> isn't it?

Why pathetic? I don't think so.

>
> And then I see all your sophisticated projects (Gancaloon and many
> others) and I wonder how you get all that work done, beside your proper
> occupations, partners, family, other hobbies... as an early retiree, I
> have so much more free time available - and still hardly get anything
> done! Could it be that I simply do not have the talent required for
> doing 3D graphics? Or could it be that POV-Ray simply is not a software
> which supports an efficient workflow (are there any professional 3D
> designers using POV-Ray? I doubt...)?

I know it is difficult, but I have learned not to compare my own work to 
those of others, especially if they seem more 'talented'/ 
'knowledgeable' / 'faster', whatever, to me. I try to do my own thing 
(you mentioned Gancaloon) at my own pace and with my own means, which 
may not be smart and often rather clumsy in the eyes of others.

That said, you may look at the real effective time you spend on 
building. It may be that you spent far less time in this than you 
realise but spread over weeks. It may depend on the tools you use beside 
POV-Ray, Wings3D for example or another modeller. Sometimes that speeds 
up work, in some cases it slows it down. The amphitheatre I built with 
Silo2Pro for Gancaloon probably took me about six to nine months 
effectively, spread over almost two years or maybe more, including the 
time I spent tearing down the whole bloody thing and starting all over 
again. The Apollo temple was even worse... and I have forgotten how I 
did some of the details so that I may need to reinvent the wheel if I 
ever need to start something similar again. Very frustrating, which 
makes me repeat to myself again and again: "document your work, you 
nitwit!". Not that it helps much, though.

>
> Given the current speed of progress, this modest airport tower will
> occupy me for the entire year 2016 - not to mention the terrain
> heightfield, which will be completed around 2030, having started in 2004
> (unless there will be satellite elevation data of the same resolution
> readily available!). So I'll spend a vast portion of my life to cobble
> together a crude version of POVghanistan/Khyberspace, without ever being
> able to visit REAL Afghanistan (originally, Khyberspace was meant as a
> substitution for the unreachable real thing) and obviously lacking the
> basic skills necessary for POVing, let along using any other
> modeler/raytracer... Khyberspace probably will never be much more than
> Kabul International Airport... I just waste my life!

To begin with the end, no, I would not consider it a waste of life if 
you get enjoyment from what you are doing, at whatever pace you are 
progressing. It is the toiling itself which is important, more that the 
end product. From a SF novel, I recently noted the following:

"For the artist the real joy is in the creation of a thing. When you 
feel something growing under your hands, you grow with it. You're alive, 
the energy flows. When it's finished, you stop growing. You stop living. 
You only live for the next act of creation." Fate Ravenglass Winter (in: 
Joan D. Vinge: The Snow Queen, 1980).

I think this is very true (at least for me).

Khyberspace is inside your head, Yadgar, and that is where it really and 
only can be great and wonderful. Gancaloon is in my head and every 
render I make of it is just a pale approximation of the real, thriving, 
populous, raw, thing. I shall never visit Gancaloon as you never will 
visit Khyberspace, except in your head and in your dreams. And yet we 
are compelled to build those virtual spaces.

>
> It's so frustrating... all these things are so huge, and I'm so small!

That is life indeed. And yet, your mind is larger still.

>
> See you in... forget it!
>

In Khyberspace. Why not?


-- 
Thomas

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