Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:

> ...it seems that it may be prudent to sort through them
> and determine, for each, if it's suitable as a standard scene for
> today's POV-Ray.
>
> Mostly this applies, I think, to samples in the advanced folder,
> rather than the demos of various features.
>

I've just methodically rendered all the demo scenes in the advanced folder (only
in v3.62, sorry) and, honestly, I think all of them are still 'useful' in one
way or another, if only for coding examples. Maybe CATS (povcatray.pov) looks a
bit out of date visually (an understatement!); but even that might have nuggets
of code that beginners would still find useful.

The DRUMS2 scene has some extraneous old text that could be removed.

The only scene that seems to have an actual problem is DESK. It's an animation
file, but I can't get it to animate using only the included desk.ini file (which
contains the animation parameters.) Perhaps I'm doing something wrong; someone
else needs to give that scene a try.

A more 'global' thing concerning the various scenes is that they have different
assumed_gamma settings (or none at all.) No doubt a result of their age; but
that might be a source of confusion with v3.7. Of course, that's the way they
were set up, so I wouldn't know what to recommend (if anything.)

Also, some of the scenes have an explicit #version 3.5 directive. Just wondering
if those should be changed to at least 3.6.

The day before Chris posted this message, I also happened to go through all of
the  various 'cameras' in the SCENES/CAMERA folder, and found a few minor things
that need attention. In many of the files, there is a 'boilerplate' text
section...

"don't forget to render this with the image ratio equal to 1 (height = width),
or, instead of being framed in a half-circle, the upper part of the image will
be "squished" into a half-ellipse."

In more than a few cases this is wrong, on two counts: The 'fisheye' and
omnimax' cameras need a 4:3-ratio render, not 1:1; and the stuff about being
"squished into a half-elipse" is a mystery altogether. (I can't honestly say if
this text section is right *or* wrong in the four 'cylinder' cameras, but it's
there too.) BTW, the text section in the 'spherical' camera is correct AFAIK.

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