Since there appears to be no utility for converting from POV-Ray 3.1 scene
language to other formats, I have been thinking about how to solve it myself
and I have 99% of a solution. The remaining 1% is a function that returns
the referent of any identifier, no matter what type - string, float,
pigment, texture, array etc - as a text string. str(FLOAT_IDENTIFIER) does
this job for floats. I need stranytype(ANY_IDENTIFIER).

Since more and more organisations, especially those outside the media and
manufacturing spaces, are beginning to recognise the benefits of modelling,
visualisation, and prototyping, script-based modelling of the sort that
POV-Ray does excellently on its own, is going to be more and more important.
I'd love to contribute to a long and happy life for this fine application.

My guess is that, for C++ guru familiar with the POV-Ray source, this should
be pretty straightforward.

Any takers?

Neil

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Hey all,

what is up?? My name is Abe Heckenbach, and I am a newbie to these newsgroups.
I have only recently(past 3 months) gotten into ray tracing, and I think is is
awesome(Who doesn't??). I am particularly interested in real-time ray tracing
for the purpose of virtual reality.  Seems impossible... I know, but maybe its
not, hardware is getting faster every day, and I'm sure there are software
speed-ups that haven't been figured out yet(in fact I have a few ideas myself!)

I'm interested in joining the POV-team to discuss ray tracing techniques, and
help develop povray(I'm kinda new the C programming also, but I catch on quick,
actually my first C program was a ray tracer to test one of my ideas, but I
have been programming other languages for years, like java(and before that
perl,basic,unix shell scripts,ect.))

I would like to start a group, website and corresponding newsgroup, to discuss
virtual reality, (everything necessary to a finished VRE Setup(hardware and
software requirements), but completely from a theoretical point of view)
If anyone is willing to host something like that let me know. If anyone is
interested in any of this let me know, I would like to discuss it with people).

Later,
    Abe H.
    abe### [at] vrmlk12laus

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> what is up?? My name is Abe Heckenbach, and I am a newbie to these newsgroups.
> I have only recently(past 3 months) gotten into ray tracing, and I think is is
> awesome(Who doesn't??). I am particularly interested in real-time ray tracing
> for the purpose of virtual reality.  Seems impossible... I know, but maybe its
> not, hardware is getting faster every day, and I'm sure there are software
> speed-ups that haven't been figured out yet(in fact I have a few ideas myself!)
> 
> I'm interested in joining the POV-team to discuss ray tracing techniques, and
> help develop povray(I'm kinda new the C programming also, but I catch on quick,
> actually my first C program was a ray tracer to test one of my ideas, but I
> have been programming other languages for years, like java(and before that
> perl,basic,unix shell scripts,ect.))
> 
> I would like to start a group, website and corresponding newsgroup, to discuss
> virtual reality, (everything necessary to a finished VRE Setup(hardware and
> software requirements), but completely from a theoretical point of view)
> If anyone is willing to host something like that let me know. If anyone is
> interested in any of this let me know, I would like to discuss it with people).

Real time ray tracing is impossible at this time with the Personnal Computers we
got...  You would probably need a super computer for this to be acheived...

The best thing you got is OpenGL (Open Graphics Library for the C++), it is a
"process of creating 2D renditions of 3D objects"[Foley/vanDam]...

You have acces to TONS and TONS and MEGATONS of good documentation about this
subject, also, keep in mind that OpenGL will never give you what POV-Ray can,
but it can do more that what you think, even in 3d gaming OpenGL has not been
used to it's maximal possibilities...

There is a newsgroup about OpenGL, but it's SGI oriented and you might prefer
the linux implementation MesaGL that has a mailing list...

Here, try www.Mesa3d.org and you should get more documentation, you can also
check out the links they got...  this should interest you!

Hope this helps,
	Simon

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