Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:

> To be sure, I am a bit sceptical about the success of such a
> theme-of-the-month thing, as you say, considering the experience with
> TC-RTC.

True - I'd say there are a lot of contributing factors there.

1. POV-Ray doesn't really have an advertising department, so the people who know
about it are few to begin with, and it's a specialized group.  It's not a
passive and mindless activity.
2. POV-Ray has that whole steep learning curve.
3. Constructing a scene can be difficult and time consuming.  It takes practice
to know what you need to make _beforehand_ and then there's the process of
working out the placement, geometry, textures, lighting, etc.  A modeler can
help, but it's still a slow iterative process, full of debugging SDL, etc.
4. People are squeezed for time, and working out a scene takes long stretches of
uninterrupted time.  There are many times when this can be an increasingly rare
luxury.

I'd say the idea is still sound, and good - but I'd use the monthly topic as a
launching point for addressing the above obstacles.

Advertise.
There have been a lot of good people doing a LOT of good work over the years to
make POV-Ray better, more usable, and writing their own tools to make it faster
and easier to make scenes.  Keep up the good work.
There also needs to be a clear reason why people would want to use POV-Ray over
Grasshopper, Maya, Blender, and all of those other packages....


Just throwing some thoughts out there.

Post a reply to this message