Am 26.07.2013 03:26, schrieb Samuel Benge:

> If I were to claim a(ny) prize, I'd have sky_sphere-based textured fog make its
> debut in the next version of POV-Ray :D (although I do realize it's not that
> sort of wishlist :P)

:-D

There's only one reason I'm currently /not/ planning on adding such a 
feature to the branch I'm working on: There's reason to believe it'll 
make it into POV-Ray 3.7.1 faster than you can say "pretty please" (*), 
and I'd rather have my branch copy that feature from there than vice 
versa :-)

(* And I also have reason to believe that the first POV-Ray 3.7.1 trial 
versions will pop out just shortly after the 3.7.0 release proper, and 
that the first release of my own branch will come out more or less at 
the same time as 3.7.0 proper.)

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On 26-7-2013 4:55, clipka wrote:
> It's also like saying that a child shouldn't be playing with any toy if
> it doesn't know how to play with it the way the designer intended.
>
> Which is rubbish even if there is solid reason to play according to the
> designer's rules (unless of course violation of those rules is seriously
> dangerous); science has found out that children actually learn faster
> how to use something properly if they've already spent some time toying
> around with it as they seem fit, and there is plenty of reason to
> suspect that this is the case for every learning process in every age.

I thoroughly agree with that indeed!

Thomas

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On 26-7-2013 0:28, Shay wrote:
> A CSG (primitive primitives) sub-round of the tcrtc might draw some
> interesting entries.

I shall note this down for future reference. Once the new procedures are 
in place (which will be soon I hope) we can launch indeed such a challenge.

Thomas

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"clipka" <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote in message 
news:51f1eefb@news.povray.org...

>> That train was impressive. Used prisms*, so, imo, a whole other animal.
>
> No, not really. There, too, it was all about cutting stuff away and adding 
> stuff back in.

Similar techniques and an equal challenge, for sure. But, if there's a 
distinction between a "csg scene" and a "hand-coded scene", I see the 
primitive primitives as the logical place to make that distinction. 
Primitive primitives are the Neoplasticism of hand-coding.

 -Shay

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"clipka" <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote in message 
news:51f1e658$1@news.povray.org...
>>
>> For some reason I knew clipka would be the winner (that train he was 
>> working on
>> a while back was a clue).
>
> Hey, the (intended) winner was the POV-Ray wishlist :-)

Yeah, about that. I can find no way to support POV-Ray. The wishlist is 
empty, and the 'support' link on the website links to the online forums 
page. You're (to me) the most visible POV developer at the moment. Is there 
a book or something you'd find useful?

 -Shay

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"Samuel Benge" <stb### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message 
news:web.51f1d0413a6d0c04ae2c701b0@news.povray.org...
>
> If I were to claim a(ny) prize, I'd have sky_sphere-based textured fog 
> make its
> debut in the next version of POV-Ray :D (although I do realize it's not 
> that
> sort of wishlist :P)

If there were that sort of wishlist, I'd wish for fudgable tangent-maps for 
bicubic patches.

bicubic_patch {
    vertex_vectors ...
    normal_vectors ...
}

would allow, I think, one to smoothly (to the eye) join patches at valence 
!= 4 vertices.

 -Shay

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Am 26.07.2013 11:32, schrieb Shay:
> "clipka" <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote in message
> news:51f1eefb@news.povray.org...
>
>>> That train was impressive. Used prisms*, so, imo, a whole other animal.
>>
>> No, not really. There, too, it was all about cutting stuff away and
>> adding stuff back in.
>
> Similar techniques and an equal challenge, for sure. But, if there's a
> distinction between a "csg scene" and a "hand-coded scene", I see the
> primitive primitives as the logical place to make that distinction.
> Primitive primitives are the Neoplasticism of hand-coding.

Would you consider boxes as primitive primitives for that matter? 
Because I see not much of a conceptual difference between those and 
(linear) prisms: Both can be replaced by a compound of planes.

I'd also like to note that the power of (linear) prisms does not lie in 
being a shortcut in terms of CSG (after all it would be comparatively 
easy to throw together a macro that takes an array of vertices and 
generates a prism constructed from planes), but in being much faster to 
render.

As for the terms "csg scene" and "hand-coded scene", here's how I'd 
define them:

- CSG scene: Any scene that defines all its complex shapes as unions, 
merges, intersections and/or differences of less complex solid shapes 
(which in turn might also be defined this way); after all, that is 
exactly what "CSG" means: "Constructive Solid Geometry". (In the strict 
sense this would even allow for meshes, provided they have an 
inside_vector, but I'd be ok with still disallowing them.)

- Hand-coded scene: Any scene that was created using nothing more than a 
text editor and POV-Ray itself.

The two terms are perfectly orthogonal: The shapes in a CSG scene can be 
both hand-coded and/or created with a CSG modeling tool, and a 
hand-coded scene can have both CSG shapes and/or non-CSG shapes.

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Am 26.07.2013 11:40, schrieb Shay:
>
>
> "Samuel Benge" <stb### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message
> news:web.51f1d0413a6d0c04ae2c701b0@news.povray.org...
>>
>> If I were to claim a(ny) prize, I'd have sky_sphere-based textured fog
>> make its
>> debut in the next version of POV-Ray :D (although I do realize it's
>> not that
>> sort of wishlist :P)
>
> If there were that sort of wishlist, I'd wish for fudgable tangent-maps
> for bicubic patches.
>
> bicubic_patch {
>     vertex_vectors ...
>     normal_vectors ...
> }
>
> would allow, I think, one to smoothly (to the eye) join patches at
> valence != 4 vertices.

You mean cases where two vertices of one patch coincide?

I'd rather have genuine triangular bicubic patches.

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Am 26.07.2013 11:36, schrieb Shay:

> Yeah, about that. I can find no way to support POV-Ray. The wishlist is
> empty, and the 'support' link on the website links to the online forums
> page.

Heh. The "support" link isn't meant to be for people intending to 
support POV-Ray, but for people requesting support about POV-Ray :-P

> You're (to me) the most visible POV developer at the moment. Is
> there a book or something you'd find useful?

You've caught me off guard there - I'll try to come up with something.


Alternatively, I might point you to one of the following pages:

   http://www.lipka-koeln.de/%C3%BCber-pov-ray/
   http://www.lipka-koeln.de/%C3%BCber-pov-ray/%C3%BCberpov/

and draw your (and anyone else's) attention particularly to the small 
green Flattr buttons.

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"clipka"  wrote in message news:51f1e517$1@news.povray.org...

> Did you consider punching the hole through the petal /after/
> adding the extrusion? That might allow for a simpler extrusion,
> as you won't need to punch a separate hole through it.

The most obvious way to save those "extra" holes would be to subtract 24 
holes from 13*24+1 (13 each for optimized extrusions minus one hole and then 
one sphere) objects. More elegant than the way I'm doing it now, but I'd 
lose my individual bounding objects. I'm no programmer, but I know enough to 
know that premature optimization is the root of all evil (even if it is it's 
own fun little riddle).

> I've got all the math sorted out by now (except for the more complex hole 
> extrusion stuff), so modifying the thing for e.g. 7-fold instead of 8-fold 
> symmetry, changing the petals' size and other some such would now be a 
> piece of cake; no manual tweaking anymore.

Nice. Though manual tweaking does have a silver lining. Once I make 
something *too* easy, I have to face the temptation of re-using the same 
tool over and over again. There's something to be said for looking at each 
component and thinking "how the hell am I going to pull that off?"

> As long as you code just for the fun of it, my stance is that coding is 
> fair game for everyone in every way they like.

Hear! Hear!

Right now, I'm trying to forget half of what I *do* know about programming. 
I see myself doing less programming in the future, so I want to downsize to 
a more maintainable skillset. Honestly, I can understand Perl I wrote 9 
years ago better that some of the Python I wrote 2 years ago. Conscious 
competence *quickly* withers on the vine.

> (And no, I have not the slightest idea what a chiasmus is - I'd have to 
> google that ;-))

You're familiar with the structure, even if you don't know the word.
The definition might build your vocabulary, but it won't re-build your 
narrative.

-Shay

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