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

> A few weeks ago I played with the idea of using crackle as base for a
> wood texture. It was just a quick test, but see the attached image.
> Aimed for pine, but ended up with something more like tulip poplar I
> think. :-) The code used is simple and I believe it would work with the
> crackle in official releases of POV-Ray too.

Now that _is_ interesting!
When I have the opportunity and energy, I ought to try incorporating that into
Marschner's wood texture and see if that improves things.

I'll bet this would also look great if rendered with SSLT.
You'd probably have to use actual displacement mapping - maybe with a
heightfield or isosurface to get the variations in geometry and thickness.

> I believe POV-Ray has long been self-hindered with respect to developing
> good libraries of textures. Too many features on which textures /
> materials are based behave in unstable ways. Much of my effort with the
> yuqk fork has been to tune up the old core of code; To make existing
> features more stable and more flexible (You've helped - 'quilted' and
> 'radial', for example). I'm still on that tune up bit...

Well, we have a lot of basic patterns that serve as the basis of actual textures
- given the proper inclusion and setting of a wide variety of (incompletely
understood) switches and knobs.

I think that the approach that Thomas took - generating a proper, fully-formed
texture with a macro is a very promising approach.

Certainly a lot of often-encountered inefficiencies and errors could be avoided
if we had some macros to handle sanity checking and the proper implementation of
feature settings for all those fun things like radiosity, floating point math,
etc.

- BW

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