William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

> If talking about a branch someone could compile themselves, good. I plan
> to assemble publish such a branch(1).

I think that would be a nice tool to have, for a number of reasons.

1. It simply doesn't make a lot of sense to work on things that no one will be
using.  So publishing it for use allows people to, obviously, use it - but also
their use of the branch advertises it in some way and encourages further use.
(IMHO, POV-Ray proper (PRP) could use more of this [a] )

2. It provides a means of accomplishing something that may be impossible using
the current release, vastly simpler, or just far more accessible to folks with
limited time or just not enough time to concoct a scheme to code a clever
work-around

3. Using such a branch allows people (like me ;) ) to break it and find the
bugs, thus driving its iteratively increasing stability, and providing usage
statistics supporting it suitability for inclusion in PRP.


> (1) - Thinking that branch will include additional new functions /
> function / pattern updates. I have a list of potential new functions and
> am playing with several not yet posted about now. I'll probably pick up
> Jerome's rotate warp too in some form.

IIRC, at least 3 people have expressed explicit interest in the vortex
pattern/function.  [jr, TdG, Yadgar, ...] I don't know what you'd need in order
to roll that in as well.

> I'm likely to hack at the current implementation of the new potential
> pattern too... I find myself not sure how to really make use of the
> potential pattern capability with most shapes. It works well only with
> blobs today(1a). I've thought a fair bit about how to extend the
> potential pattern to other shapes, but I've got no idea how to normalize
> the values in the ray-surface equation values space.

I found it extremely useful to look at what loads of people have done with the
ray-marching technique.  Some very interesting and simple-looking functions to
perform a wide variety of clever operations.  It made me thing about a few
things in completely different ways.


[a]
Grant Sanderson of 3 Blue 1 Brown uses python and "manim" - a math animation
package for use with Adobe AfterEffects to make his excellent videos.

Folks say it's rather hard to use with not much documentation - I'm wondering if
they might begin using POV-Ray if they knew about it and could see what it can
do. (I don't have a YT account)
Perhaps Khan Academy, and certain other channels dealing with math and physics
would be drawn to experimenting with POV-Ray's built-in capabilities for
vectors, isosurfaces, parametrics, polynomials, matrices, arrays, and animation.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab

Post a reply to this message