apophis13 wrote:
> Hello, I'm a high school student taking a three-week course on POVray
> programming this summer at City College in NYC. my first project was to create
> an image of an office with four tables and various objects on the tables using
> commands such as prism, lathe, sor and sphere_sweep. It is attached to this
> post. I was just wondering If i could get some feedback on my first POVray
> creation. It's a messy office with books strewn all over the table (I wanted to
> practice my translating and rotating skills) and a cool blue glass vase.

I think it looks pretty good for a first povray project.  I notice you 
you got a book propped up against another, which is good practice for 
getting things rotates properly in tricky situations.  The vase looks 
good too, although flower petals (maybe with a bunch of prisms) and a 
bit of water in it might look good as well.

> also, how would I make the chair's seat more rounded and comfortable-looking.
> i.e. how to make boxes more rounded at the edges, not pointy.

As Darren has suggested, take a look at the superquadratic ellipsoid object:

http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/285/
http://dynamicdreams.com/cg/img/scene_super3.jpg

They can be pretty good for cushions, in which case I'd make the seat of 
the chair thinner and simply put a cushion on top of it.  The back of 
the chair still looks a bit painful to sit on, and to fix that I'd 
suggest changing the back of the chair to be a different style, like one 
of these:

http://www.anaturalhome.com/images/products/cherry-chair.jpg
http://images.oneofakindantiques.com/5901_ladder_back_chair_1.jpg

Which I think should only be a little bit tricky to model.

> also, how would one go about making more realistic books? perhaps I could import
> images for use as textures to put covers on the books. how do you do this?

I think that using an image as a texture for the covers could help a 
lot.  You'll need to use an image map for this:

http://ftp.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/337/

Probably you'll want to use several image maps, one for each part of the 
book (i.e. front, back, spine, and pages).  You can look for the images 
either online or by using a digital camera to take pictures of actual books.

It's also useful to have an actual book (or at least a picture of one 
that's the same style you want) to work from when doing the modeling. 
This one I found online seems to be about like what you want:

http://www.joes3dfantasyworlds.com/down/misc01/pileofbooks01-t.jpg

You'll notice that the pages are inset from the cover somewhat, and the 
spine is shaped more like a thin cylindrical shell.  These things might 
help you a bit too.

Do post the final image when you're done, I'm curious to see it!

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