In article <3edd3d1f$1@news.povray.org>,
 "Ray Gardener" <ray### [at] daylongraphicscom> wrote:

> > 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.

POV textures *are* procedural. Image maps are relatively rarely used.


> 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.

Uh, you may want to look at the POVMAN patch, which lets you use 
Renderman shaders on top of the existing procedural texture system.


> 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.

I don't think you're going to save any time by building a scanline 
renderer on POV. Instead, you'll be spending lots of time figuring out 
how to hack your renderer into a system that was never designed with it 
in mind. I don't think you have any idea what you're getting into. 
You're free to try, of course, but I honestly don't expect to ever see 
anything substantial out of this. You'd be far better off staying with a 
separate program than trying to wedge a scanline renderer with those 
features into POV.


> > 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.

I'm not familiar with Renderman, so...what are you talking about? Some 
kind of procedural geometry? That can be raytraced, within certain 
limits. Either generate and store it beforehand or use a specialized 
algorithm to do it at render time (as was used in that paper I mentioned 
in another reply).


> 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.

You like procedural geometry but don't like isosurfaces?

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

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