I have been humoring the possibility of creating a texture editor for
Pov and am wondering if it would be worthwhile and what features people
would like.  I have been using TextureMagic 0.95 and find it to be sadly
out of date.

Is there a demand for this type of utility, and if so what would people
like it to have?

Tim Burton
TBu### [at] ThrtCom

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Good Texture Editors are always needed.

Tim Burton wrote in message <35A4DB20.909E57C2@Thrt.Com>...
>I have been humoring the possibility of creating a texture editor for
>Pov and am wondering if it would be worthwhile and what features people
>would like.  I have been using TextureMagic 0.95 and find it to be sadly
>out of date.
>
>Is there a demand for this type of utility, and if so what would people
>like it to have?
>
>Tim Burton
>TBu### [at] ThrtCom
>

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I use the one in Moray - seems to be do the job.


Tim Burton wrote in message <35A4DB20.909E57C2@Thrt.Com>...
>I have been humoring the possibility of creating a texture editor for
>Pov and am wondering if it would be worthwhile and what features people
>would like.  I have been using TextureMagic 0.95 and find it to be sadly
>out of date.
>
>Is there a demand for this type of utility, and if so what would people
>like it to have?
>
>Tim Burton
>TBu### [at] ThrtCom
>

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Tim Burton wrote:

> I have been humoring the possibility of creating a texture editor for
> Pov and am wondering if it would be worthwhile and what features people
> would like.  I have been using TextureMagic 0.95 and find it to be sadly
> out of date.

I can only agree with you, only it would take quite some time to produce
something better than that, if you have that time, go for it.

> Is there a demand for this type of utility, and if so what would people
> like it to have?


There sure is demand.

Probably very different types of demand whether you want it freeware or
shareware. I am interested in freeware as far as POV is concerned, or at
least same as I'm trying to do for myself : free for non commercial users
licensed only for commercial users (there are many categories that people
don't think are commercial users but really are commercial users,
advertisement is commercial use even if the person advertising did not pay
for the advertisement media).

First it is nice to have a library of textures to pick from (POV standard
texture files).
Then it is nice to have one's own libraries (possibly in a different
selectable directory).

What I would really like is some graphical means to tweak the parameters
(like octave and the likes as well as transformations). When I say graphical
I mean that a transformation is something you can visualize with a box that
is rotated, elongated and sheared at will. The some of the octave or other
turbulence parameters can be visualized as 3d vectors. Such a graphical
interface would really help understanding the textures much more easily.

It would be marvellous to be able to combine textures in texture maps via
your tool.

An important issue is a quick preview, if you have some time and the
approval of the POV team, you could copy the code for textures out of the
box and preview this directly, thus avoiding intersection tests, that would
speed up your preview in a big way. The only thing you need to add in the
end is an extra rendering function to render normal modifications (lighting)
for which you still do not want any intersection test - you don't care about
reflections, you are only doing a preview of what the texture looks like by
itself. The real view will be done with POV, so don't bother with recreating
POV.

A good colour selection facility that includes finding a colour form RGB,
CMY, HLS or other colour model as well as from named colours (don't forget
the ability to sort colours by name or by colour with some linear criteria,
could be Hue, Saturation, Luminance, Intensity, Red, or whatever colour
attribute).

I hope I don't put too much on your plate, I would love to see something
definitely comprehensive.

Cheers,
Al.


--
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Tim Burton <TBu### [at] ThrtCom> wrote:
: Is there a demand for this type of utility, and if so what would people
: like it to have?

  As long as it isn't win95-only.

-- 
                                                              - Warp. -

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It would definitely be Freeware.  The fast texture render is appealing, perhaps
I will check with PovTeam and see if that is possible.  Thanks for your input.

I have enough spare time to invest in the project for windows, however I am not
willing to spend the time to write the software for any other platforms.  I am
willing to work with people interested in making a compatable software on other
platforms, but do not wish to dual develop a single piece of software.

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What language and compiler will you be using for this program?

    Thomas Charron

Tim Burton wrote:

> It would definitely be Freeware.  The fast texture render is appealing, perhaps
> I will check with PovTeam and see if that is possible.  Thanks for your input.
>
> I have enough spare time to invest in the project for windows, however I am not
> willing to spend the time to write the software for any other platforms.  I am
> willing to work with people interested in making a compatable software on other
> platforms, but do not wish to dual develop a single piece of software.

Post a reply to this message

Tim Burton wrote:

> It would definitely be Freeware.  The fast texture render is appealing, perhaps
> I will check with PovTeam and see if that is possible.  Thanks for your input.

You are more than welcome.

> I have enough spare time to invest in the project for windows, however I am not
> willing to spend the time to write the software for any other platforms.  I am
> willing to work with people interested in making a compatable software on other
> platforms, but do not wish to dual develop a single piece of software.

 I will not lend a hand in the development, but here is a couple of suggestions
(freeware) :
1- use GCC if you can (there is a Mingw32 compiler out on the net, that is one of
the GCC 2.8.1 ports to Win32).
2- use a portable GUI toolkit e.g. V 1.20 or wxWindows 1.68 (stable) or 2.00
(alpha). The former is simple, the latter complex but comprehensive. Both are
available for Windows and Unix at least.

I am personally starting (very slowly) to develop some app, that I hope will be out
there sometime (years) and I use Mingw32 and V1.18 (cause I was lazy to upgrade to
the latest version). Both take some learning but you get to do more portable code.

Although I will not lend a hand in development, I will be glad to discuss
specifications if you so wish, then test, comment the docs and use.

here are a few URLs :
 http://agnes.dida.physik.uni-essen.de/~janjaap/mingw32/
 http://objectcentral.com/
 http://web.ukonline.co.uk/julian.smart/wxwin/wxwin2.htm

Cheers,
Al.

--
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Pour me répondre, veuillez enlever le Z de mon adresse.
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This message is really intended for Thomas Charron :

Could you please set up your computer date to be near reality (1998, not 1997) as
my automatic newsgroup reader will not download 'old' messages (20 days) and I do
not really want to be searching for each such message manually or set the date span
to more than 20 days.

Regards,
Al.

--
ANTI SPAM / ANTI ARROSAGE COMMERCIAL :
Pour me répondre, veuillez enlever le Z de mon adresse.
To answer me, please take out the Z from my address.

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The only thing i'd like to add to this new texture program...
is...
PLEASE don't make it with VB5!!!!!

I refuse to use ANY program that is made in VB5....Have you SEEN thwe
shit just the runtime dll puts into registry?.....My reg went up by
150k, JUST from msvb5 dll.

Ok, so who cares about 1 person not using a program....but I won't be
changing my mind about this....I've tried heaps of free/share progs that
use VB5...nothing yet has been worth having the crap in my reg...

-- 
The only good politician is a dead politician !!
Politics or religion = corruption and true evil.
Believe 1% of what you see or hear.
The laws that politicians make are mostly bad laws,
  we'd do far better without them - the politicians AND their laws.

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Morpheus Dreamlord <mor### [at] mailexcitecom> wrote:
: Ok, so who cares about 1 person not using a program....but I won't be
: changing my mind about this....

  There are 2 persons not using the program. My reason is that the original
author is going to make it a win95-only program.

-- 
                                                              - Warp. -

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If you write the program in c/c++ it is fairly easy to port to other
machines.  If you really want portability then write the program in java.
If you write it in java (which is a language similar to c++) then just the
one copy of the prog will run on any java capable machine or os.

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HeHe, I noticed that soon afterwards..  Seems by battries are going on the blink..

    Thomas Charron

Alain CULOS wrote:

> This message is really intended for Thomas Charron :
>
> Could you please set up your computer date to be near reality (1998, not 1997) as
> my automatic newsgroup reader will not download 'old' messages (20 days) and I do
> not really want to be searching for each such message manually or set the date span
> to more than 20 days.
>
> Regards,
> Al.
>
> --
> ANTI SPAM / ANTI ARROSAGE COMMERCIAL :
> Pour me répondre, veuillez enlever le Z de mon adresse.
> To answer me, please take out the Z from my address.

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the feature that i'd most like in a texture editor for povray is one that
can import textures from povray code.   From any pov source file or include
file.    Another feature i'd like to see is the ability to save a library of
thumbnails associated with textures. it would just save any render of a
texture in the library as a seperate image file.   this would make it easy
to browse through textures you've already made without having to wait for
each one to render to see what it looks like.

Tim Burton wrote:

> I have been humoring the possibility of creating a texture editor for
> Pov and am wondering if it would be worthwhile and what features people
> would like.  I have been using TextureMagic 0.95 and find it to be sadly
> out of date.
>
> Is there a demand for this type of utility, and if so what would people
> like it to have?
>
> Tim Burton
> TBu### [at] ThrtCom

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Hi,

On Tue, 21 Jul 1998 19:06:49 -0700, in povray.binaries.utilities you
wrote:

>the feature that i'd most like in a texture editor for povray is one that
>can import textures from povray code.   From any pov source file or include
>file.    Another feature i'd like to see is the ability to save a library of
>thumbnails associated with textures. it would just save any render of a
>texture in the library as a seperate image file.   this would make it easy
>to browse through textures you've already made without having to wait for
>each one to render to see what it looks like.

if you only want to get thumbnails of all POV-Ray textures located on
your harddisk, perhaps my program TextureView (freeware for Windows
95) could help you... take a look at
  
  http://www.rz.fhtw-berlin.de/~s0049669/software.html

Bye,
Friedemann



Friedemann Schmidt
Fri### [at] Stonescom
Raytracing-Gallery: http://www.rz.fhtw-berlin.de/~s0049669

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Bret Slivka wrote:
> 
> the feature that i'd most like in a texture editor for povray is one that
> can import textures from povray code.   From any pov source file or include
> file. 

I don't think this is at all easy to implement.  With the possibility of
includes, file i/o, macros, and texture assignments to variables and
arrays,  it would be extremely difficult to extract textures without basically
parsing the entire source.

Dan

-- 
http://www.flash.net/~djconnel/

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Dan Connelly wrote:

> Bret Slivka wrote:
> >
> > the feature that i'd most like in a texture editor for povray is one that
> > can import textures from povray code.   From any pov source file or include
> > file.
>
> I don't think this is at all easy to implement.  With the possibility of
> includes, file i/o, macros, and texture assignments to variables and
> arrays,  it would be extremely difficult to extract textures without basically
> parsing the entire source.
>
> Dan

TextureView by Friedemann Schmidt does an excellent job on any
#declared texture in any standard pov file. Although it doesn't preview
textures inside of the body of an object statement it does a great job of
allowing you to search entire directories for #decalred textures and gives
you a choice to render each texture into a thumbnail view with pov as the
rendering engine. This ensures that what you see is what you get. As far as
the difficulty of texture extraction when it does it's directory search for
textures
it searches only for declarations of textures and ignores the rest of the pov
code.
After doing a search of my main include directory which is very extinsive by the
way it came back in about 4 min. with 1200 textures. Pretty impressive if you ask
me.

K.Tyler

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I can see the problem though, I often use calculated values in colour_maps
for example to animate textures. This would be a bit of a trick to parse.
Also which texture do you render, the one at clock=0.0 or clock=0.5 or....

Gordon
<gbe### [at] birdcameroncomau>

K. Tyler wrote in message <35C2E5BD.3551F37A@pacbell.net>...
>Dan Connelly wrote:
>
>> Bret Slivka wrote:
>> >
>> > the feature that i'd most like in a texture editor for povray is one
that
>> > can import textures from povray code.   From any pov source file or
include
>> > file.
>>
>> I don't think this is at all easy to implement.  With the possibility of
>> includes, file i/o, macros, and texture assignments to variables and
>> arrays,  it would be extremely difficult to extract textures without
basically
>> parsing the entire source.
>>
>> Dan
>
>TextureView by Friedemann Schmidt does an excellent job on any
>#declared texture in any standard pov file. Although it doesn't preview
>textures inside of the body of an object statement it does a great job of
>allowing you to search entire directories for #decalred textures and gives
>you a choice to render each texture into a thumbnail view with pov as the
>rendering engine. This ensures that what you see is what you get. As far as
>the difficulty of texture extraction when it does it's directory search for
>textures
>it searches only for declarations of textures and ignores the rest of the
pov
>code.
>After doing a search of my main include directory which is very extinsive
by the
>way it came back in about 4 min. with 1200 textures. Pretty impressive if
you ask
>me.
>
>K.Tyler
>

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