Bill DeWitt wrote:
> 
> "Vahur Krouverk" <vah### [at] aetecee> wrote :
> >
> > I guess that those, who use POV-Ray, should be able to read it without
> > problems.
> 
>     So if I spend the time to learn shaders, is it likely that in the future
> there will be an effort to include renderman standards in the official
> Pov-ray? 
This should be asked from POV-Ray team, as I don't have enough authority
to comment on this one. But I do hope that this happens sometime in
future. 
One problem could be legal issue: can freeware (such as POV-Ray) use
language, which is used and created for commercial program? I know, that
there is effort to make GPL-ed RenderMan implementation and several
other implementations are available and I hope, that Pixar will not put
it's hand on way, but there is always possibility, that money will talk
louder than common sense. So far, so good...

> Or would I be learning for the patch and nothing else?
Why nothing else? Learning per se is good thing ;o) I personally have
learned great deal of CG stuff (and other things) during creation of
this patch, so at least one person has already benefitted from this
patch. Using Shading Language is good for profound knowledge of CG.

I personally don't think, that Shading Language _itself_ is complex,
especially for those, who know C and CG basics. But _creating_ _good_
shaders is quite complex and knowledge demanding task and not for
everyone. One has to know math (geometry, differential analysis for
antialiasing), physics, optics etc.
This is the reason, why I want to make POV-Ray support for it as
compatible as possible to RenderMan's standard: this way POV-Ray users
can reuse existing and available shaders by modifying only shader input
parameters, which shouldn't be more difficult, than specifying
parameters for some POV-Ray feature (such as radiocity). And advanced
users can tinker with shader code...

Knowing shading language and using it in POV-Ray makes transition to
real-production programs (such as RenderMan, BMRT, RenderDotC) a little
bit easier if someone wants to move from POV-Ray to professional CGI
world. RenderMan interface is flexible, powerful and (unofficial)
standard in CGI.

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