I am interested in 3D modeling and POVRay in particular because of the strength
of the Scene Decription Language.  I am not an artist by any stretch of the
imagination and that's where I go wrong with mesh-based modeling programs like
Blender -- you quickly get to a step where you are required to tweak your
creation visually, whereas with the SDL if you can define it mathematically
then you are golden.  I can picture what I want in my head, but representing
that as a mesh is tough.  I have seen some nice pictures on IRTC that were
created with nothing but SDL.

I have created several smaller scenes with simple unions, differences, etc --
but my question is for a more complicated model, are there any texts available
that train you to see in real-world objects the spheres, partial torii,
cylinder intersected with a plane unioned with a lathed spline, etc?  As an
easy real-world example I'll use a book case -- I can take a rectangular solid
box and then remove several smaller boxes to make shelves.  That one is pretty
easy to see, but what about more complicated and irregular objects like a bird
or a space shuttle?

I suppose this is more of a general art question with applications to either
sculpting in clay or computer modeling -- but I have searched a few Barnes and
Nobles, Amazon, and several resources on the internet but cannot seem to track
down what I'm looking for, or even how to accurately phrase the question to
make a meaningful Google search.

Thanks for any help you can point me to!

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