On Thu, 06 Dec 2001 23:22:05 +0200, Vahur Krouverk
<vkr### [at] comtradeee> wrote:

>Angelo 'kENpEX' Pesce wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 6 Dec 2001 18:45:27 -0500, Alessandro Coppo <a.c### [at] iolit>
>> wrote:
>>>The ONLY reason why I haven't just downloaded BMRT and stopped thinking 
>>>about POV is that BMRT is even less open source than POVRay!!!
>>>
>> 
>> Just use PovMan... BMRT is too slow...
>Huh? So far I had intention to only read this biig thread due to lack of time, 
>
>but this statement makes me really to ask:is BMRT really slower than 
>POVMan in similar scenes?? I really doubt it, especially if one takes 
>into account that latest versions of BMRT allow to use precompiled 
>shaders, which give performance boost 40-250% (according to 
>c.g.r.renderman NG???) and are written by L. Gritz, who has learned CG 
>in university, worked in Pixar and should know much more about CG than 
>me (who has hacked this latest version of POVMan without any education 
>in CG or similar areas)? According to my small performance tests most of 
>time goes into texture calculation, so if one uses shaders, which are 
>calculated by current implementation of shader's VM, then performance 
>hit, which is not small, should be taken into account...
>One big problem with shaders in POV-Ray (if we are talking about 
>RenderMan shaders ) is that quite number of them is intended for 
>parametric surfaces (in RenderMan most (or all?) primitive surfaces 
>could be described as u-v parametric surfaces) and using such shaders in 
>POV-Ray limits their use into small number of primitives, which have u-v 
>parametrization implemented. And as I understand, separate step of 
>compiling shader for POV-Ray seems to be too hard (or complex) for 
>users, it would be better, if shader is described in POV-Ray SL (scene 
>lenguaje) or compiled transparently.

I don't really know. I've seen that BMRT is *really* slow, and povman
seemed better but I haven't done real comparisons. Btw BMRT is too
slow to be really used imho, so U should try povman... :)

>>>P.S.: why the POVTeam asked in fact for feedbacks in the past about POV4 
>>>feature list when all of you already have granitic ideas about what is 
>>>"good" and what is not? I do not ask questions when I have already made up 
>>>my mind.
>>>
>> Yes, is seems that noone has doubs about povray, its future and what
>> should be done
>
>
>Sorry to be OT here, but it really seems to me, that 'older 
>>habitants' started immediately 'to circle wagons', as you hit this NG 
>>with all these proposals. On one hand I quite understand them (as my 
>>butter to bread
>>comes from software projects, where responsible people (myself 
>included!) are quite wary about changes in existing software development 
>process or source code due to business risks) and such topics were 
>discussed many times ('beaten to death') in this server NG-s, but on the 
>other hand I'd like to see more openness from people, as some responses 
>are quite defensive, seems like people take proposals in this thread as 
>personal attacks or flamewar attempts.

This is really true... I'm not doing any critic to current povray
status, but many (not every) ppl here replyied me just saying this is
impossible or that, povray already supports this thing and better than
every other renderer, even if later I have demonstrated that something
were false, the thread just died... For example the nurbs stuff, most
ppl here believed that those should be done by the modeller so the
mesh support in povray was already the "state of the art". Well, when
I demonstrated that most commercial renderers support nurbs directly
noone talked about this, they said those ideas are already known...
How can U tell that if many ppl believed that this was simply a bad
thing to do?

>One note about POV-Ray: in many cases you said, that you like to see,
>that POV-Ray had more 'features', which are in commercial renderers. Yes, 
>it would be good to have faster (in terms of rendering and scene creation) 
>and more powerful application, but there is number of renderers competing in this
>area and doing it better and faster for professionals; I see POV-Ray 
>mainly as cheap (in terms of price, not possibilities!) tool for 
>hobbists and beginners in CG area, from POV-Ray they can move to more 
>proffessional and effective tools (like H.E. Day did).

Well I think that this is not the objective of povray... If this is,
all the stuff I posted here is a complete nonsense...

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