In article <3a587381@news.povray.org>, "Mick Hazelgrove" 
<mic### [at] mhazelgrovefsnetcouk> wrote:

> But Runes suggestion would be easily available to many users who do 
> not have your mathmatical skills. Or do not frequent these 
> newsgroups.

That is the reason for many of the macro collections on the web.


> Not to start a war because I think Pov and its creators are 
> wonderful. All to often programs are written by very clever people 
> who don't always realise how thick the user is!  I'm an artist I 
> trained for many years as one, my mathamatical skills and programing 
> skills are very limited. I do not have much time to learn mathamatics 
> at the level you lot work at and at 55 find that level of thinking 
> increasingly difficult. At the same time my artistic skills continue 
> to improve and grow.

Well, you don't necessarily have to come up with this stuff to use 
it...there is even a chance of some stuff like this making it into the 
official distribution.


> All I ask is an awarness from the cleverer members of our fraternity 
> that there is a diversity of users with different needs, which is why 
> I think as many facilities as possible should be programed directly 
> into Pov in as simple and easy way to understand and use as possible.

There is a problem with this approach: the program gains more and more 
special features that could easily be done some other way, and soon it 
is impossible to learn the language and program maintenance is more 
difficult. If one feature can replace several others, I say go for that 
one feature.
For example, there is a "material_map" feature in POV that doesn't act 
like any other of the "_map" features (and doesn't have anything to do 
with materials, but they came later), it takes an image and uses it to 
map textures. There was already texture_map, which works with any 
pattern...it would have been better to add a single image_pattern or 
pigment_pattern feature which could be used with texture_map, 
pigment_map, etc...instead of adding more and more specialized features 
that only work with textures or pigments.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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