On Thu, 02 Sep 1999 09:50:26 -0700, Ken wrote:
>
>
>Vahur Krouverk wrote:
>
>> Well, indeed it is done already, but this page seems to be really old
>> and seems like he haven't published source code. Does anyone have
>> contact with him?
>> At least this page shows, that shaders in POVRay are possible...
>
>I have no more data than what I provided. Did you search the site ?
>This was allegedly accomplished with a Pov v2.2 patch and the source
>should be available somewhere.

The source was on the old ftp.povray.org, and is still on ftp.cdrom.com
in /pub/povray somewhere.  Nobody's ever gotten it to compile and run
properly, and it's not been ported to 3.x.  It's also got some severe
limitations, among them the fact that it doesn't support uv mapping and
the derivative stuff from SL.  Those things are both fairly vital, so
the average SL texture from the net wouldn't be usable.

However, with Nathan's UV patch (especially if we all pitched in and
extended it to the objects that still need it) and the information in
the '99 SIGGRAPH paper on tracing Ray Differentials, it could almost
work.  It's still a lot of work, and you'd probably want to ignore
POVMAN and just start over.

Other suggestions have included creating a plugin interface that
allows for compiled shaders in shared libraries, or in Java classes.
Unfortunately, neither of those solutions scales to every platform
POV supports (DOS has no Java, apparently, and definitely no shared
library support.)  In addition, of course, such an interface would
violate POVLEGAL so it couldn't be distributed unofficially.

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