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Dear friends-povers !
All of us know that our lovely oldest but goldest ray tracer has
great potential, but unfortunately not much popular among the modern
community for a couple of reasons: complicated SDL, lack of dedicated
editor (but Blender can export), not enough information in media, etc.
Bill works hard to improve this situation, but the skills and time of
one man is not enough for such complicated and time consuming stuff. I
would like to assist him all ways I can and have a following proposal.
Having conversion service for all popular graphics formats
(https://povlab.yesbird.online/all2pov/) now we can try to attract
people from most active CG communities, at least:
https://www.zbrushcentral.com/
https://www.artstation.com/
https://blenderartists.org/
https://polycount.com/
I am already registered in many of them, and can try to make some
advertising to to POV-Ray there. The main problem I see here is a
lack of modern and convenient communication channel - newsgroups are
outdated and people don't want to take a step (or more) back.
Realtime chats, fast graphics and video exchange is very important when
discussing technical graphics details, so if we need to move forward,
appropriate service is a must have.
You will laugh, but I guess that Discord channel will be the best
solution as it is very popular among CG and gaming society, easy to use
and satisfies all our needs. We can use it not instead, but as addition
to our present newsgroups publishing best images, technical hints, and
answering questions.
What do you think about all of the above ?
Let's make POV-Ray great again ! (Or, maybe, not ?)
--
YB
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yesbird wrote:
> You will laugh, but I guess that Discord channel will be the best
> and satisfies all our needs. We can use it not instead, but as addition
> answering questions.
00face has a server running. See:
https://news.povray.org/povray.general/thread/%3Cweb.67b3c5fb138c20b68918f8c4aef99e11%40news.povray.org%3E/
I tried to gain some traction, but I'd say that there needs to be a lot more
activity in order to "make it happen"
Please visit, and post your best renders, ideas, projects, tutorials, etc.
Dedicated boards/channels/whatever-they're-called for POV-Ray.
- BW
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On 30/09/2025 19:29, Bald Eagle wrote:
> I tried to gain some traction, but I'd say that there needs to be a lot more
> activity in order to "make it happen"
I understand you, exactly.
> 00face has a server running. See:
>
https://news.povray.org/povray.general/thread/%3Cweb.67b3c5fb138c20b68918f8c4aef99e11%40news.povray.org%3E/
> Please visit, and post your best renders, ideas, projects, tutorials, etc.
>
Thanks, I was there before - not serious, not popular, nothing to see
there. But I will try to join ...
--
YB
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On 1/10/2025 02:04, yesbird wrote:
> Dear friends-povers !
>
> All of us know that our lovely oldest but goldest ray tracer has
> great potential, but unfortunately not much popular among the modern
> community for a couple of reasons: complicated SDL, lack of dedicated
> editor (but Blender can export), not enough information in media, etc.
>
> Bill works hard to improve this situation, but the skills and time of
> one man is not enough for such complicated and time consuming stuff. I
> would like to assist him all ways I can and have a following proposal.
>
> Having conversion service for all popular graphics formats
> (https://povlab.yesbird.online/all2pov/) now we can try to attract
> people from most active CG communities, at least:
> https://www.zbrushcentral.com/
> https://www.artstation.com/
> https://blenderartists.org/
> https://polycount.com/
>
> I am already registered in many of them, and can try to make some
> advertising to to POV-Ray there. The main problem I see here is a
> lack of modern and convenient communication channel - newsgroups are
> outdated and people don't want to take a step (or more) back.
> Realtime chats, fast graphics and video exchange is very important when
> discussing technical graphics details, so if we need to move forward,
> appropriate service is a must have.
>
> You will laugh, but I guess that Discord channel will be the best
> solution as it is very popular among CG and gaming society, easy to use
> and satisfies all our needs. We can use it not instead, but as addition
> to our present newsgroups publishing best images, technical hints, and
> answering questions.
>
> What do you think about all of the above ?
> Let's make POV-Ray great again ! (Or, maybe, not ?)
I have a list of things I want to add to POV once we get 3.8 out of the way (I need
someone to do that as I can't, at least not right now). Most of the things in my list
touch exactly on the topic of getting more traction. Primarily, the way I see we could
get most traction is by having not just the full POV-Ray in releases (i.e. what we
have now), but also a libPOV - i.e. POV-Ray as a library, without a parser,
specifically intended to be integrated with third-party applications.
This will provide the means for platform-independent raytracing (whether intending to
really raytrace or just to create simple graphics) in applications via a
carefully-defined API implemented in a few officially-supported major languages (at
least C++, C# / dotnet and Python - the latter is critical). The API would allow
direct creation of objects without using SDL, plus permit calling existing functions
such as trace etc. It would also allow for animations to avoid having to re-parse the
entire source when only moving the camera (or a few objects as long as bounding is
re-calculated).
Apart from making it easy to add sophisticated graphic generation to just about
anything, from a simple python script up to a huge C++ application (a good example
would be rendering circuit boards in PCB editors).
Additionally it would make it much easier for existing 3D tools to add POV-Ray support
since rather than having to generate SDL they can call our API directly.
I have a few libraries that I have squirreled away somewhere that would add value,
such as generic object import; I'll have to dig them out and list them here.
As for engagement in terms of talking / forums - I have a dislike of walled gardens
like Discord as the knowledge shared there is locked away from search and thus does
not benefit the general public. I would consider endorsing one provided we have a path
to extract the chats / threads into a form we can have on our website, thus allowing
it to be indexed via search engines.
As for our forums themselves - the entire forum system here on news.povray.org needs
replacing with a much more modern alternative. I have a (commercial, but affordable)
candidate I would like to use, but the one thing that is bugging me is it would
require dropping support for NNTP (unless I want to write a plugin for it, which I
don't). If we went this way basically the current forums would be made available on
the new site as a read-only copy of what's here now, separate from the live forums.
There's a bunch of issues with moving to a new forum (like, do we make the effort to
match user accounts with the archived posts) but overall I consider it essential in
the long term.
I'm interested in hearing from existing NNTP users as to whether the move to a
web-based forum will be an impediment to you.
Finally: all the above is a bit of a brain-dump that I came up with in the period of a
few minutes; a much more detailed reply would take me hours as I would need to look at
all my notes and saved links accumulated over the last few years. Hence some of what I
said here may be not quite right, but the overall meaning is, I hope, understood.
-- Chris
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On 9/30/25 18:04, yesbird wrote:
> What do you think about all of the above ?
And how many povers are on Mastodon ?
https://mastodon.tetaneutral.net/tags/povray
--
** **
* tTh des Bourtoulots *
* http://maison.tth.netlib.re/ *
** **
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On 30/09/2025 20:46, Chris Cason wrote:
> I have a list of things I want to add to POV once we get 3.8 out of the
> way (I need someone to do that as I can't, at least not right now). Most
> of the things in my list touch exactly on the topic of getting more
> traction. Primarily, the way I see we could get most traction is by
> having not just the full POV-Ray in releases (i.e. what we have now),
> but also a libPOV - i.e. POV-Ray as a library, without a parser,
> specifically intended to be integrated with third-party applications.
At first look it sounds very promising, but I remember a few discussions
here that came to the conclusion that this is almost not possible or
will take too much effort. At the same time Blender and some Python
libraries generate SDL and it works fine, but not too fast. If someone
wants real-time graphics generation OpenGL, Vulkan, WebGL, WebGPU will
be the better choice. Real-time ray tracing on CPU is unlikely possible,
I guess.
> As for engagement in terms of talking / forums - I have a dislike of
> walled gardens like Discord as the knowledge shared there is locked away
> from search and thus does not benefit the general public. I would
> consider endorsing one provided we have a path to extract the chats /
> threads into a form we can have on our website, thus allowing it to be
> indexed via search engines.
>
Yes, this is a serious disadvantage, no doubt, the standard forum will
work much better for us.
> I'm interested in hearing from existing NNTP users as to whether the
> move to a web-based forum will be an impediment to you.
As for me, I will leave Thunderbird easily - always dreamed about
something more convenient.
In general, I would like to make a contribution to the POV-Ray project,
but don't want to get back to C++, after more than 30 years working with
it. I am joined the WebGL community now and implementing some external
online tools and services attracts me much more.
--
YB
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On 1/10/2025 05:25, yesbird wrote:
> libraries generate SDL and it works fine, but not too fast. If someone
> wants real-time graphics generation OpenGL, Vulkan, WebGL, WebGPU will
> be the better choice. Real-time ray tracing on CPU is unlikely possible,
I never said anything about RTR. Specifically, I mentioned "platform-independent
raytracing" - this is the entire point, it's independent of GPU or API. Anyone using
it does not need to care what the target system is equipped with.
> but I remember a few discussions here that came to the conclusion that this is
almost not possible or will take too much effort
I'm not sure of where/when those discussions were, but, given I have worked on this
codebase for 30 years, I think I have a pretty good idea of what's possible and how
much effort is involved. Basically if I want to do it, I can do it and the effort is
not an issue.
-- Chris
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On 01/10/2025 01:28, Chris Cason wrote:
> I never said anything about RTR. Specifically, I mentioned
> "platform-independent raytracing" - this is the entire point, it's
> independent of GPU or API. Anyone using it does not need to care what
> the target system is equipped with.
I was confused by mentioned 'animations', now I see that it has no
relation to RTR, sorry.
> I'm not sure of where/when those discussions were, but, given I have
> worked on this codebase for 30 years, I think I have a pretty good idea
> of what's possible and how much effort is involved. Basically if I want
> to do it, I can do it and the effort is not an issue.
Sure, no doubt.
> I have a (commercial, but affordable) candidate I would like to use, but the one
thing that is bugging me is it would require dropping support for NNTP (unless I want
to write a plugin for it, which I don't).
May I ask you about details of your choice ?
I like how Discourse (not mix with Discord :)) works and already tried
it for 14 days: https://www.discourse.org/
I can be indexed and has NNTPplugin:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/sync-discourse-with-nntp/58602
But migration will be painful, agree.
--
YB
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