Very useful information, thanks. Radiosity and Photon mapping are awesome
features and I will spend more time learning about them. Keep in mind that
this book is not being written for existing POV Ray users specifically but
rather for people that have never heard of it as well as people that have.
Therefore its probably not going to satisfy all the needs of the advanced
and well rendered users. My only competition at this time is my own book
which is out of print. I would also not be surprised if Lutz adds those two
features to Moray at some point, but again I don't see that Moray is going
to consume huge numbers of pages in this book either.

"Gilles Tran" <tra### [at] inapginrafr> wrote in message
news:3c4c0c21$1@news.povray.org...

> 3c4a67cf$1@news.povray.org...
> > Are these all freeware programs,
> > because the one disconnect with Moray is that its retail product and
that
> > does not work very well with the free nature of POV. What about
including
> > some of these products in the gray text, would that be a turn off?
>
> With Hamapatch going shareware, the number of freeware, actually popular,
> presently supported modelers is close to 0 right now (blender is a special
> case and blender-to-pov scripts are currently under development). New
> modelers are popping up every week though.
>
> > I wonder about the statment "it's impossible to really unleash povray's
> > power without learning the scene description language"? How is that
true?
> > "And some of the coolest povray stuff is not implemented in these
modelers
> > yet." Well there is SO MUCH stuff in POV Ray that is implemented in
these
> > modelers that I am not sure a book needs to cover everything in POV Ray,
> > that seems like a daunting and almost impossible requirement.
>
> Currently, two features allow povray 3.5 to produce results as good as the
> latest batch of costly professional renderers : radiosity and photon
> mapping. AFAIK, the 3.5 version of these features is not implemented in
any
> modeler yet (OK, I suppose that there may be plans to do so for Moray).
> Isosurfaces are also a very important feature, quite unique by what it
> allows users to do (and again not supported elsewhere). And of course, the
> programming features of the SDL (such as macros, loops etc.) have become
> essential. Sure, you can get far without these features, but only
1997-far.
>
> Again, I suggest that you get acquainted with how current users are
actually
> using povray these days. A good start would be reading some of the *.txt
> files that go with the IRTC images, for instance (just look at the 6 top
> entries of each round) : that will give you a good idea of the various
tools
> used. Browsing through past povray.binaries.images would help you to get
an
> idea of the features that people appreciate most. You could also look up
> what the "competition" is in terms of rendering quality (see
> http://www.splutterfish.com) , since this is what many people expect now.
>
> G.
>
> --
>
> **********************
> http://www.oyonale.com
> **********************
> - Graphic experiments
> - POV-Ray and Poser computer images
> - Posters
>
>
>

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