3D4B9F18.B1CC85DF@gmx.de...
> I agree that shaders are a great addition to POV-Ray's texturing
> possibilities, but i don't think they could be a replacement.

Obviously. As I said, programming shaders is something for programmers or at
least very advanced users. The regular way of doing things in Povray works
well enough for most tasks. The ability of reading shaders would be a plus,
and a facility for regular users (who would not have to learn the shading
language to use them of course). What amazed me with Vahur's implementation,
even limited as it was, is that it expanded greatly Povray's abilities
without overloading the SDL, thus making things more simple.

> I did not look into the 3.5 source yet, but i guess using functions for
> finish manipulation should be possible without fundamental changes, making
> trace() etc. available in functions would be a great improvement too.
> With these blurred translucency and anisotropic highlights would no more
> be beyond the scope of POV-SDL.

Sounds great. A more general approach like this should be preferable to the
"hey I'm going to implement this little cool function and add a few more
keywords" that was prevalent in Megapov patches. That was nice enough of
course (and fun to implement for the programmers), but not so valuable in
the long run.

G.

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