John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:


> This comes across as a buttload of work to get the job done.  POV-Ray's CSG
> is not a very good tool for doing organic shapes; organic shapes aren't
> impossible, but they take a heap of work.  One thing I was amazed with
> when working on the mesh modeler--especially when combined with a good
> surface subdivision algorithm--was the speed by which I could get a model
> done.  Things take hours instead of days and come out looking much better.
>
> When the object being modeled is made from cylinders, spheres, cones, etc,
> CSG produces much better results for a given effort level, but for organic
> shapes Beziers, splines, and subdivision surfaces deliver much better
> results for the same investment of time.
>
> Regards,
> John


Thanks for this perspective.

One thing that is unarguable about this technique is, to quote some IRTC
comments, everything is an **extreme challenge** to model.   ;-)  ;-)

Yes, it does take more time.  And thus I spend nearly all my raytracing time
refining the models and very little actually animating. Kind of like tuning
race cars instead of driving them. I also sort of take pride in doing
things the wrong way and going against the flow.

And to some degree, I'm hoping that my astronomical investment of time will
not be required to be duplicated from scratch to make "new characters" for
anyone else using the system.   Yes, just about every aspect of the
character is animatable within povray with my system and I could, as Rune
says, easily animate a wide variety of characters with randomized chin
shapes, leg lengths, shoulder heights, walk speeds, hand swaying, etc.   I
once also animated a Banner-to-Hulk like trasnformation in an IRTC entry
("Spinach Oil") with the use of a single parameter.  The fair question is
why use pov at all if you have to go to an external modeller.  In these
modellers you're talking about (with easy exporting to pov) can one "bone"
the lower jaw relative to the first one and animate it easily in povray?

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