"Anthony D. Baye" <Sha### [at] spamnomorehotmailcom> wrote:
> clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> > Am 04.08.2015 um 16:10 schrieb Warp:
> > > clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> > >> Note that my goal is for the language /per se/ to have a very simple
> > >> syntax, and make it pretty much oblivious to rendering, except for
> > >> providing a few special native data types like 3D vectors and colours.
> > >> It'll be up to a bunch of predefined classes to fill it with raytracing
> > >> life in its scene description role. Such a language should be generic
> > >> enough to also be suited for the shader description role, so it would be
> > >> rather pointless and user-unfriendly to devise yet another language for
> > >> that purpose.
> > >
> > > OTOH the "shader" part has to, by necessity, be more limited than the
> > > generic part of the language. It wouldn't make sense, for example, to
> > > be able to create new objects into the scene while evaluating, for
> > > example, the color of a reflected ray. That would mess up things quite
> > > badly, I think.
> >
> > That's part of the "fill it with raytracing life" thing: To add geometry
> > to the scene, you'd invoke particular classes (such as a "sphere" class,
> > a "box" class, and so on), which just won't be available in shaders.
>
> why not simply add a shader option to the texture block, and use something like
> OSL for the shader language?
>
> http://code.google.com/p/openshadinglanguage/
>
> Regards,
> A.D.B.


As a beginner, When I considered options of free renderers to learn, I chose
POV-Ray over Aqsis and other RIB like alternatives. One of the reasons was that
it had one language to learn instead of two, and this also felt a relief later
when deciding to script for an exporter, which had to be written in yet another
language (Python) (by the way Mitsuba has a full Python API/SDL which makes it
very attractive in this regard but it does miss a lot of the POV-Ray features)

Also I get the point that externalizing development by relying on solid
standards like the OSL you suggest allows developers to focus on more important
things, but the SDL is really central and one of the biggest selling point of
POV-Ray. It made me chose it not because it was standard, but because I trusted
it had the potential to be better than standard.

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