On Sat, 19 Jan 2002 22:48:31 -0800, "Mitchell Waite"
<mit### [at] dnaicom> wrote:

>I know very little about this other products: blender, spatch, hamapatch,
>anim8tor, amapi, rhino. I have tried blender but it would not run properly
>on my Win2K machine with dual LCD monitors. 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?

Blender is free but it's virtually unusable without the docs, and that
has to be paid for. Rhino is certainly not free, the student's license
was $199 last time I checked. I think anim8or is not free either but I
may be wrong here.

>I wonder about the statment "it's impossible to really unleash povray's
>power without learning the scene description language"? How is that true?

The POV-Ray scene description language is a Turing-complete language.
You can write anything with it, from a virus to a raytracer (both of
these have been done.) Of course these are extremes, but things like
particle systems for modelling smoke and fire, l-systems and other
recursive systems for modelling plants, and other similar tasks are
definitely not and are *really* useful. Many such tasks rely on close
integration with the scene and can not be currently accomplished in
any other means.

>"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.

I think the book should concentrate on the pros and cons of a modeller
and not on specific feature sets. Pros: this and that done easily.
Cons: this and that can't be done.

>"Furthermore the structure of a book about Moray would should be quite
>different from one about Povray." I don't see how this follows. Why would
>they have to have different structures? Seems like "here is how to do
>something in POV" could easily be parallel with "here is how its done in
>Moray", or whatever modeler you are using.

The approach is different. Most hand-coders start with a *very* clear
idea of what they want to achieve, because once you've nested a
million CSGs and you don't like something, going back is somewhat
hard. With a visual scene creation tool such as Moray, you can touch
up and tune things one the fly. There's much more to it, of course,
such that with POV you have to at least STTFM (Skim Through The Fine
Manual) and a Moray 'hello world' lesson can start right away... but
I'll leave that to real Moray users (I've only tried it once, in the
POV 2.2 times).

>I very much appreciate the feelback, its helping me calibrate my ideas for
>the team that is forming. Nothing has been decided so this is a great time
>for people to jump in and help shape this project.

Hope my ramblings were of some help. Good luck!


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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