> What *are* your purposes? You still haven't explained this.

I have several. Myself, I just want to draw landscapes
how I want. My company would like to provide end users
with a standalone renderer (preferably one they already
know and use) that can do landscapes more efficiently
and with procedural shaders.

I like displacement mapping, and it appears to be a
lot easier and faster with scanline rendering. Or at
least, I know how to do it that way here and now,
which is more expedient than trying to figure out
how to get a raytracer to do it. Besides, POV doesn't
handle procedural shaders anyway... that's another
thing I'd add. That'll make it a totally custom patch,
but that's alright. And down the road, I'd like
to get into film production, but I don't feel
like shelling out for PrMan when I'm perfectly
willing to study and write code, and perhaps there are
others who feel the same. And making something like
that available to everyone has a nice feel to it.
Maybe it won't be based on POV in the end, but
right now, to have something I can experiment with,
using POV saves me a ton of time. If it also happens
to let people test what POV would be like with
such features, that's a useful bonus, even if in
the end the majority thinks it isn't worthwhile.


> What do shaders have to do with the number of shapes?

It's the way I write some of my shaders. I generate lots of geometry.
e.g., a fractal cubeflake has lots of cubes in it. It's a crude
approach, I guess, but it works, and it's way easy to do.
The same reason some people use shadeops in Renderman
instead of SL.


> > For shapes like hair strands and grass blades,
> > however, supporting a spline (rope?) primitive
> > should be done.
>
> And what does this have to do with scanlining?

They'd draw faster scanlined and take less memory.


> Simple: Make a few dozen variations of tree meshes and plant a few tens
> of thousands (or more if you like) on the landscape. Blobs and
> isosurfaces can make good rocks, or you could use meshes for those too.
> And when viewed from a sufficient distance, a noisy isosurface can make
> a good bush.

Cool. But I'd rather not take up the memory,
even if it's just pointers, and, well --
I just don't like using isosurfaces. I think they're
very neat, but they're not my cup of tea.

Ray

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