"Gilles Tran" <gitran_nospam_@wanadoo.fr> wrote in message 
news:417ac4d0@news.povray.org...

> 417abc3f$1@news.povray.org...
>
>> An analogy. We are all choosing to run marathons when we take on a image. 
>> It
>> is hard to keep running hard in a competitive race when you have no idea
>> where you stand - especially once life gets in the way a few times.
>
> Well, I'm not completely buying this. In 3D, the competition is all around 
> us, in the movies, in the advertising, in the galleries of every 3D 
> software out there... I really don't think people should strive to be 
> better than the other POV-Ray user. In any case, I never did that when I 
> competed in the IRTC. My goal was always to emulate the best possible 
> stuff I had seen, and for this there were enough available material from 
> the last 25000 years of painting...

"Time-trial" comes to my mind.  You do the best that you can.  You hope for 
the best.  You prepare for the worst.  But you never know how well you 
compare until it's all over.  Not all time-trials work that way, but the 
analogy works (for me anyway).

-- 
Jeremy
www.beantoad.com