"Jim Charter" <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote in message 
news:421e6be0$1@news.povray.org...
> St. wrote:
>
> Steve you echo a lot of my own anger.
>
> I was trying to find a way to rise above this dispute.  But I guess not.
>
> So I'll say this. I thought that fact that one of the judges would 
> repeatedly use the comments section as a soapbox for this ridiculous bias 
> of his was in extremely poor form.  I was more than a little shocked that 
> such bias was represented on the judging panel at all, and even more so 
> that these petty-minded opinions were allowed to see the light of day. 
> For me it is extremely disheartening, not in the least because I enjoy 
> "pure" csg extremely, and now actually find it hard to use because this 
> "issue" has been so stupidly politicized.  These comments are, in my 
> opinion, low-minded, retrograd, and do not reflect the spirit of POV-Ray.
>


When I read some of the comments on the top images, I felt that way too. 
After the deadline extension, I basically added a few mesh objects to my 
image (and replaced some CSG objects with other CSG objects), which I 
thought would improve it.  Those comments made me wonder if I had actually 
done the wrong thing.

But after reading many of the judges comments (I still have not read them 
all), I realized that in many cases, participants were lauded for their 
effective use of 3rd party modellers.  The position that "Twin girls with a 
pearl earring" achieved is directly contradictory to that kind of thinking. 
While some of the comments came across as being negative and sometimes even 
crass, I think that such things were largely limited to the comments area. 
I have showed the winning entries to several people who know nothing about 
POV-Ray, and overall, they agree with the judging.  To me, that means that 
despite any comments to the contrary, it appears that the judges did not 
apply a CSG-centric bias to any appreciable degree.  And again, those 
comments which implied more weight for CSG seemed rare, in my opinion.

Point blank:
In an impossible to achieve hypothetical situation, if there were 3 
identical images where one consisted completely of 3rd party models 
(purchased or free), one consisted of models the author created using a 
modeller, and one consisted only of CSG (nothing external to POV-Ray), 
should the latter not score highest in competition to show the full 
potential of POV-Ray?  In the big picture, perhaps they should all be given 
equal weight, but this competition had a more narrow goal.  The amount of 
weight that CSG was given seems evident by the judging, and it does not 
appear to me that it was very appreciable.

This is just my opinion and as you know, I do have some CSG bias, along with 
a procedural texturing bias.  My point here is simply that such biases do 
not appear to have impacted the judges decisions any more than what seemed 
relevant given the scope of this competition.

-- 
Jeremy
www.beantoad.com