Sorry for top posting. I was going to reply inline but I think it would 
be messy.

I'm not going to get involved with the debate with "Adorable Jim" and 
JR. Not my style.


> There people generally answer "but Blender's interface is awkward". THESE DAYS ARE
OVER. They did a complete rewrite for version 2.5 and yet another complete rewrite for
version 2.8


And they broke the OBJ file importer when they did.
I am looking into doing manual repairs to the objects in Blender. I’ve 
had some success with the transparency problems. Next on the list is a 
UV mapping problem with the importer. Then I can contact the OBJ 
importer's developers.

Most of my time recently, has been spent testing Blender’s Stop Motion 
addon. Which uses the OBJ importer to import a sequence of meshes, one 
per frame. Version 2.1.0 is working as advertised.

Then I am going back to work on Poser trying to get Bullet Physics to 
introduce a Breast jiggle into animated meshes. A willy wobble too. ;)

> Persistence of Vision became something worth defending for the common good of all
the digital world:

It certainly is.






On 26/07/2020 22:34, Mr wrote:
> Good day ! Any information can help. So:
> 
> Jr, I must start by telling you thanks again for trying to help me to get
> HGpovRay to compile last time, further than what appeared on the newsgroups
> since you did send me personal emails on my request to help me with files you
> had provided here. Though I still haven't managed to build hgpovray under
> windows is another issue. I felt mentioning this could help keeping the talk
> fair and not make you appear as a pure pressurizing ranter. Before hopefully
> closing your dispute and refocusing on topic.
> 
> I must express my disagreement with this point: that both Chris Cason and Jim
> Henderson would owe us anything... In fact it's the opposite. The community owes
> *a lot* to them.
> 
> Note that Jim has always been a particularly adorable person, but that is
> besides the point. Though he is now "retired" from this task, Jim's work on
> documentation has been exemplar and not only relatively to the open source
> world. It's one of the reasons I felt POV had not that much to envy to some
> professional software around. POV doc is better than 3D Studio max's doc and
> that's not the worse commercial one available at all.
> 
> Meanwhile on developer-side, this value is certainly acknowledged. The natural
> feeling of the POV syntax in general and the way it was carefully extended for
> every new feature proves it constantly.
> 
> SO, I am very glad that Chris Cason does not feel discouraged and is open to
> have such a debate and keep up with all this.
> 
> 
> *About Moray:
> 
> I hope this won't sound bitter nor jealous of its achievement because it surely
> was and will be a great piece of software.
> But people asking for it all the time... well, kind of slightly gets on my nerve
> :-) why? when I have been striving to get some feedback for ten years, and keep
> adding and fixing features to the Blender-to-POV-and-back addon, which may, or
> may not, be less perfect in many ways. I get none... No, almost none, thanks to
> people like Jim, Stephen, and a few others of whom you may well be. but the
> point is not much feedback and even less contribution.
> 
> I would also be glad to have Moray up and running, but Blender is so feature
> packed that Moray will not be much more than Wings compared to it in the best
> case scenario: a subset.  There people generally answer "but Blender's interface
> is akward". THESE DAYS ARE OVER. they did a complete rewrite for version 2.5 and
> yet another complete rewrite for version 2.8
> 
> These changes did cost us time. We had to fix the exporter in so many ways. Now
> it's getting back to its functional state of version 2.79 at last... And now
> default selection is Left click. I know we didn't do all this for nothing, but I
> wish others knew it as well! If all those who just wait for Moray or instead try
> to rebuild their own modeler from scratch had contributed, be it just with
> patient feedback, this community would already just be having fun with one hell
> of a tool, and I speculate this would be source for some if not all of the
> momentum, that seems to be desired by everyone participating in the present
> discussion.
> 
> I did consider to rather invest all my time in Moray first, but it's build in
> lower level language, that I know much less about. Currently very little of the
> Blender addon is implemented in C++, only Syntax highlighting, the rest is all
> Python awesomeness. If we did have more experienced programmers or if I became
> myself as proficient with C, even then, I would wait for Moray to be as feature
> packed as Blender before giving it primary focus.
> 
> Note that I would not exclude dedicating some time to it as a close second
> however : that's why we named the add-on without restricting it to the Blender
> field. I would rather see in the long run the "POV Converter" as a suite of
> tools or a hub / pipeline glue between several 3D and 2D apps mutualising
> resources for Blender(Python3), [Freestyle-->] Inkscape(Python3), Moray(if
> Python 3.x support is an option, that would actually enable us to do something
> more for it than just feedback or documentation).
> 
> 
> *About POV:
> 
> Persistence of Vision became something worth defending for the common good of
> all the digital world:
> 
> It can be the first language a child learns. Yet it actually is so powerful at
> what it does that it's pretty close to rival what was used not so long ago to
> produce the best feature length movies at Pixar.
> 
> If one knows his way around "non conservative" / "expressive NPR" options, it
> can even be of some use in more precise work like scientific visualization, or
> predictive rendering. Though a little below the "competition" (only where
> spectral nature of light is involved) in this field (Luxrender has this at
> heart) But POV-Ray remains unbeatable geometry wise.
> 
> 
> 
> So...
> 
> 
> *What could be improved?
> 
> A)Get to open up more to other communities.
> 
> Something almost happened once:  Campbell Barton, one of the top 3 Blender devs
> reached out to offer a week end of his to set up a C-Make based cross platform
> build system for POV.  No-one seemed interested. (He had started and we have a
> cloned archive of his files so someone with the skills could still pick it up).
> What could happen then? Then the addon could be delivering a POV engine within
> the Blender package. We would have the luck to benefit so much more literate
> testing, debugging...
> 
> B)Modernize its image... People do not realize how lively and adapting the
> software and its community are.
> 
> Here are three examples:
> 
> "Radiosity" in most software designates the technique to actually bake the
> diffuse secundary bounce illumination solution to vertices (vertex color), that
> is generally a very rough precision approximation of what pov does which is
> elsewhere rather called  Global Illumination, the kind POV does, I believe,
> being more specifically called "Irradiance" based, but please someone more
> versed could correct me if I'm wrong. However this reads as if POV had no GI !
> 
> "Raytracer" In the main part of a software name is no longer used because 99% of
> renderers are raytracers, currently often physically based, path tracers,
> whatever... But except Freestyle and the likes, there is almost no
> "non-raytracers" this makes it looks as if POV had not evolved since the
> nineties.
> 
> The logo used at the head of the documentation:
> "Persistence of Vision" in the Maiandra GD font with bump cracks disappearing
> when viewed small and not that nice when big ; "of" tilted 45°; and not one but
> two shiny transparent spheres was fine then... in the nineties. Even the blue
> logo on the banner of the website is more modern, but the one on the POVwin
> splash screen is better than both in this regard. (please if you could avoid
> abbreviating, at least the logo to "povray" that would be great for french
> speakers, to which it sounds something like "RETARD" or "POORTHING", so any time
> we communicate people just laugh. I personally refer to it explicitly as
> Persistence of Vision in interfaces and use only the very short form POV when
> lacking space... Until it gets so famous for his long lasting life that I can
> get away with simply calling it "Persistence"  in most situations :-)
> 
> C) Get more self confident in current workflow to fidelize users, but please, do
> not give up +RTR feature.
> 
> Though it's not a scientific approach, I sometimes have the curiosity to examine
> some 3d rendering / POV related keywords trajectories using google Trends. And
> though this easily reveals how massive the requests for Blender are over POV,
> however, when you reach far enough into the past, and add a real time engine
> such as Unity at the very beginning of the data, it reveals that POV was at the
> time bigger than today's biggest player, and that it was the object of more
> curiosity than V-Ray, Renderman or MentalRay ! I really wonder what could have
> provided this bubble and start to daydream about re-taping into that growth
> potential for my favorite software. The real time feature does not have to be as
> good as the rest. It can just be an entry point, but if it's given up, I think
> it would become a bottleneck in the attractivity of the software.
> 
>
https://trends.google.fr/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0150lk,%2Fm%2F0l1qq,%2Fm%2F041kyp,%2Fm%2F06bpry,%2Fm%2F0dmyvh
> 
> 
> Sorry for the length of this message, and eventual non native speaker mistakes.
> Thanks for reading, and for all the rest !
> 
> 


-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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