"Samuel B." <stb### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:

> It's not always easy to port shader code to POV-Ray script. It can be done, but
> things often have to be nested in a funny way.

I've had a lot of success following along with MS and IQ, as well as others.
Sometimes it takes a few tries to get things to all fit together properly, and
get the correct syntax for all of the functions.

The real value is to see how all of the pieces of what makes the scene - the
camera, geometry, lighting, shadows, reflections, etc are all governed by their
respective formulas, and all get linked together to produce the final image.
None of it exists - but it all works together to produce an image that is the
result of the evaluation of a single formula - the same formula - for every
pixel, based only on the uv coordinates of the pixel.

That, Bill Pokorny's tutelage in using POV-Ray's functions, and Jerome
Grimbert's excellent and myriad examples of patterns really helped me understand
the underpinnings and ways to structure shapes and patterns, which helped me
understand and solve some long standing problems and then proceed to stretch out
and explore some really cool extensions to those basic principles.  Tor Olav
Kristensen's mentoring me in using macros to assemble complex functions, using
Bernstein polynomials, full-color patterns, and many other cool tips and tricks
over the years have allowed me to explore even more territory in terms of
constructing custom functions, crafting complex geometry, and better
understanding how to manually create triangle meshes, work with surface normals,
and tons of other stuff.   jr is a wizard at coding a diverse range of
algorithms, and using dictionaries and macros to achieve amazing levels of
complexity in projects with real utility.
And of course the innumerable contributions of clipka, TdG, Friedrich
Lohmueller, and many many others.

I have learned SO much over the years, and overall, it is something that still
remains fun, and retains the magic and excitement of discovery and exploration
of new territoy.


> I hope a future version of POV's SDL more closely resembles GLSL or other
> languages, and gives us more access to lower-level data. At the very least, I'd
> like to have proper swizzles and maybe a unified approach to definitions (the
> function/macro divide is huge sometimes).

Yeah - the shaders are all compiled, so it's more coding / writing algorithms
rather than trying to shoehorn an algorithm into daisy-chained mathematical
functions.


> I'm not familiar with Martijn S. but I know about IQ, having been into shaders
> for a while now. He seems to have developed a good number of functions and
> methods for doing things, and even maintains a site where we can learn all about
> it. Sometimes I wonder if raymarching might not just surpass triangle rendering
> at some point for games and film. Maybe not, but it is more flexible in certain
> ways.
>
> Sam

Martijn runs "The Art of Code"
https://www.youtube.com/@TheArtofCodeIsCool/videos

Great live coding sessions.

IQ is obviously busy with family - I hope he starts posting new material
sometime soon.  SO much to learn from him.

And thank you, Sam, for all of your cool little projects that you bring to us
here, and for turning me on to Shadertoy - it's made a HUGE difference in how I
approach things, and has allowed some of my projects to be really fun successes,
whereas without what I learned from Shadertoy, they would have been frustrating
or impossible.


- BW

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