Jim Charter <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote:
> >   As I have already said in another article, this was a competition to
> > show the capabilities of POV-Ray, 

> Which you associate exclusively with CSG

  You seem to have the same obsession as St. has.

  Since composing the entire scene with third-party models was considered
negative (because it basically uses just one single POV-Ray feature:
mesh rendering), you now are completely convinced that meshes were
completely forbidden and that if an entry used even one single mesh
it would have not won.

  You also seem to know better what I mean by "to show the capabilities
of POV-Ray" than I do, and seemingly no amount of explaining will
convince you otherwise.

  Are you calling me a liar too?

> not a competition to show how POV-Ray
> > can project meshes onto the screen.

> only how it can project primitives onto the screen

  Uh? You call algorithmic programming, isosurface tracing, sphere sweep
generation, procedural texturing and other features "projecting primitives
onto the screen"?
  If so, you have a pretty limited view of what POV-Ray can do.

> How is it, in your opinion, that a mesh, hand-modeled to express 
> sublties of organic form, say the complexities of the flesh around a 
> human eye, is in anyway "cheap"

  Because it shows the power of a third-party modeller program, not the
power of POV-Ray. It's just a cheap way of getting pretty images generated
by POV-Ray, using less than 1% of its features. You could as well use
any other renderer to get the image from the models.
  The animal shown in the winner image can probably be made in 10 minutes
with a graphical nurbs modeller by someone experienced. As such it would
have not shown any talent nor dedication at all. However, using POV-Ray's
own means to create the figure showed creativeness and talent.
  And that was just the simplest part of the image. Using isosurfaces
for the ship was simply awesome. If the entire ship had been a mesh
created in another program, there wouldn't have been anything impressive
about it (at least without knowing how exactly it was done; if it was
done just by moving vertices around with the mouse then there's nothing
impressive in that; it would have been a "cheap" way of doing it, regardless
of how long it took to move all the vertices with a mouse).

> At worst it is proselytizing, even gloating, in light of a known and 
> inflamed controversy.

  You are seeing more than there is in the comments.

-- 
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