Tek wrote:
> Actually as far as "shading" goes pov's pretty lame. e.g. conserve_energy 
> only works on transparent things, which means if you want realistic 
> gloss-paint you need a layered texture, and pov won't let you layer over 
> patterned textures... Seriously these kind of restrictions have no place in 
> a shader style language. In fact the whole syntax of the finish statement 
> means you have to bend over backwards to do anything clever (like 
> anisotropic shading, never mind BRDFs). Uh... oops looks like you touched a 
> nerve... :)

Hehe, yeah, after a couple of courses at my university I was thinking 
the same thing. BRDFs, better layering etc would really be handy and to 
current standards. Then again, there are always some that implement new 
stuff, and in the recent years advances were rather fast-paced. People 
like to use the new stuff, but there aren't that many able to understand 
how they really work, let alone properly implement them into a versatile 
and powerful environment such as POV-Ray (and no, I don't want half-a** 
implementations like in Maya, where stuff crashes all the time). In some 
regard, there's also the overhead to be considered: we all know how 
radiosity and photons can start crawling with enough samples, simply 
because a raytracer has to raytrace and there aren't as many quick, 
GPU-accelerated approaches on that sector...

Personally, I think that once POV-Ray would allow for multi-pass 
rendering (e.g. with switches for lights on certain passes, object 
on/off etc), people would be able to work around a lot of issues simply 
by rendering a couple dozen passes, e.g. to simulate various 
light-samples and later on, composite them. That's how I actually 
achieve quite a few effects anyways: rendering the scene once or twice 
and using the results to enhance the image (e.g. bloom or glares). I 
don't like how it's a a crude approach and people using different 
software might get different results.

> But the fact that you can describe objects using a language, so you have 
> loops and conditionals and stuff, is just awesome.

Total agreement on that.

-- 
aka "Tim Nikias"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

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