Mueen Nawaz <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
> Hi,

Hello, and welcome...


>  Right now I'm just trying to create shapes accurately and model their
> texture well for practice - not with any artistic goal in mind, but just
> to learn how to use POV-Ray to get stuff done creatively.

Well, there are a lot of ways to create shapes and POV can do/use most of
them, so I'd say the issue here is how comfortable are you with the
scripting interface...

>  My real question is, "Should I learn how to use any external software
> like JPatch to assist me in drawing my objects?". I've always assumed
> that this was a bad idea for beginners, but is it really?

My 'beginner' phase was entirely with Bryce not POV, and Bryce's modelling
capabilities are very limited in comparison so I tended to do most of it
with external software; spatch, poser, wings etc...

>  Just want the opinions of those who learned POV-Ray well - did they put
> off using such utilities till they felt they were good enough with the SDL?

I found that having worked with different modelers gave me a better
understanding of what was happening with SDL.  If I hadn't used spatch
before, I think trying to learn splines and lathes in POV without being
able to see what I was doing would have been slow and frustrating. But
then, I'm not a programmer and I don't have much of a math background;
someone with different experience might find those simple and intuitive.

On the other hand, I'd had enough experience playing with BASIC on my old
C-64, that I did see immediately the power of having things like while
loops and conditional branching, particularly when trying to build complex
structures. Those can get very tedious to model by hand in a patch or
subdivision modeler.

So what do you like? The best tool is the one you're comfortable with.  For
me, POV would have been difficult without the background I had from other
tools, but now that I've become accustomed to SDL I find Bryce slow and
awkward.  I still use jpatch & wings a lot for organic shapes, because
modeling them in POV is beyond me, and I use planetgenesis when I need
terrains because the math necessary for isosurface functions is also beyond
me, but everything always comes back to POV to arrange, texture & render.


> When an agnostic dies, does he go to the "great perhaps"?

As long as he's not an insomniac dyslexic agnostic... in which case he stays
up all night wondering if there is a dog...

RG

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