Speaking of macros, and this whole camera business...

In order to clear this up for myself, and perhaps once and for all (maybe)
putting this baby to bed, I'm working on a pov file and studying screen.inc to
perhaps get a good, thorough nooby tool developed to SHOW what is going on.

This of course leads me to a few problems, and questions that may be
overcomplicating things and in the final result, superfluous.

First, screen.inc would not work until I added an extra parameter (1) to the
Set_Camera input from screen.pov, since it needs 4 parameters, and it was only
supplying 3 - the "ortho" parameter wasn't being passed to the macro.

Second, apparently there is meant to be text diplayed on the "screen" -
#declare MyTextObject =
text {
   ttf "crystal.ttf", "target: enemy base", 0.01, <0,0>
   scale 0.08
   pigment {color <1.0,0.5,0.2>}
   finish {ambient 1 diffuse 0}
}

That doesn't show up, and I'm currently investigating why.

Third, my current goal is to write up something that graphically demonstrates
what's going on internally with the render engine so that the User can follow
along with data output to the "screen" showing the values of the relevant
variables.  Sort of like a dashboard on a car.  Fire up an animation.ini file
that moves the camera around, changes key variables that affect the camera and
view, and those variables and the result are dynamically displayed on the
"screen" as the animation progresses.  Display the active directives being used
to alter the screen position or other things happening in the render(s).

Fourth, incorporate some standard scene reference objects - x,y,z axes,
directions of rotation, "pointers" and guides from light sources to show things
like point-at, spotlight fades, etc.

Incorporates some switches to turn those guides on and off so that the user can
either see them or not.  Turn on for scene development, turn off for final
render, or after they grasp what is going on.

(I've thought about having a "dual render" - where the scene is rendered without
any interfering stuff, and then a second render is automatically called from
within the SDL at the end of the first render - is this possible?)

In addition to rendering with guides from the viewpoint of the camera, I thought
it would be instructive and helpful to do a "meta-render" where the camera and
scene are actually shown from some other view.  A side or diagonal view with a
camera point, with 4 rays extending outwards to the corners of the visible
scene, etc.

While it may be a lot of work, I think it will pay big dividends in the end,
since the newsgroups will be freed from these repetitive questions about basic
fundamentals of how POV-Ray operates, provide a large number of working examples
in the pov code, will make POV-Ray more accessible to people trying to get
started using it, and the final animation would itself make a great advertising
tool to showcase what POV-Ray is capable of doing - because it does what other
things CAN'T.

If this project interests you, I'd appreciate any advice and suggestions as to
what it should include, how it should be implemented, snippets of helpful or
illustrative code or full working examples - perhaps as individual pov or inc
files to be added in, ... basically anything at all that might assist me in
making efficient progress and producing a worthwhile result.

Anyone want to help me beat a few dead horses?
It's National Sado-Necro-Equine Month.

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