andrel <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> I haven't looked into the docs for macros and functions recently (and if
> I did I would not be able to judge anymore anyway), but if they behave
> like ordinary docs, you can not read them unless you know what is in
> there. Mathuin first posted in this group 3 days ago. In general people
> wait for at least one or two weeks before posting, so I guess he*
> discovered POV about 2-3 weeks ago. There will be a lot of trivial
> things he does not know yet, like reading the examples in the source
> directories and looking in p.t.s-f and p.t.t for inspiration. You can
> blame him for not knowing these things, you can blame him for not even
> trying, but that is simply not fair. Friendly point him in the right
> direction and he'll study the docs before asking the next question and
> he'll be back within two months with a stunning picture. Attack his lack
> of knowledge and he won't come back ever again because he'll get the
> impression that POV is too difficult for him. We don't want that, do we?
>
> * or she

I've been tinkering with POV-Ray since the first IRTC disk went on sale over a
decade ago, but most of what I did was render other people's scene files and
ooh and ah over them.  A few years ago I started working on a project which was
actually interesting and useful but very limited due to my own lack of
experience.  Usenet has been essentially dead to me for almost as long as I've
been tinkering with POV-Ray, so it didn't occur to me to search for groups like
this until very recently when I picked up that project again and was
disappointed by how I'd left it.  I re-examined the POV-Ray website, found the
newsgroups, and jumped on board, searching for answers before posting when
feasible (and when I remembered *blush*) and trying to find a solution to my
problems.

With the help of the answers I have received and some of the posts I've browsed,
not only have I improved the quality of my rendering I have also improved the
speed by between fifteen and twenty-five percent.  I haven't yet learned
anything new this time around about constructive solid geometry, but the
advances I've made in understanding "all the stuff that starts with #" have
been pretty impressive.  I'm no longer cutting and pasting from other files and
trying to figure out what people are doing -- I'm reading the SDL docs and
actually trying things and it's going great guns.  I've run up against another
problem which I couldn't answer over the past few days and I'll be posting
about that momentarily but this is really the last little wrinkle before I can
post it.

The group as a whole has been very helpful.  Thank you all, even you, Thorsten,
for your help.

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