Jaime Vives Piqueres <jai### [at] ignoranciaorg> wrote:

>    This image is very nice, but the animation is amazing, almost beyond the
> AWSOME ROLEX level... Maybe there are flaws, but I cannot spot any, and I
> tried a lot of times. The whole action is so convincing that it is very
> difficult to do something more that just enjoying it with the mouth totally
> open...

Wow--thank you.  Coming from 'the master,' that is high praise indeed.
(Honestly, I don't think I could ever hope to match the level of your work.)
Your's is the 'standard candle' that I--and surely many others--aspire to.

While working on this scene, a rather 'uncomfortable' idea began to nag me: With
all of the *cheating* and tricks that I was coming up with--to reduce render
time--it also became apparent that I was kind of getting further and further
away from using POV-Ray's core ray-tracing strengths. E.g, transparency, media,
shadowing--there's very little of each. No AA either. And lots of image_maps,
with few procedural textures.

It left me feeling that I wasn't giving POV-Ray a fair chance to show itself
off. (But again, it was done solely because I wanted a relatively
quick-to-render animation; if this had been a still image from the get-go, I
wouldn't have bothered with trying to *cheat* so many things.)

Perhaps I'm being
too harsh on myself. I really have no idea if a typical scan-line renderer (like
Lightwave?) could produce the visual level of even this 'stripped-down' scene.
And of course, POV's SDL language is the core strength, such a tremendous tool
for creating and modifying just about anything I can think of--I don't think ANY
other app could match that. (Any other FREE program!) Not to mention POV's
amazing and realistic lighting ability--and reflections--two core assets that my
scene depends on.

OK, I feel better already!  :-)

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