Forgive my ignorance...

POV-Ray is very cool but is that what the gurus use to create their
masterpieces? Are there other design/development tools that I should know
about that dovetail with POV-Ray?

Also, is there a text or document directed at children to teach them
POV-Ray?


Thanks,

Bill Nicholson
Cincinnati, OH
pov### [at] nicholsoncomputerconsultingcom

Post a reply to this message

nicomp wrote:
> Are there other design/development tools that I should know
> about that dovetail with POV-Ray?
> 
> Also, is there a text or document directed at children to teach them
> POV-Ray?
> 

http://www.wikipov.org/ has some of what you are looking for.

Post a reply to this message

nicomp wrote:
> Forgive my ignorance...
> 
> POV-Ray is very cool but is that what the gurus use to create their
> masterpieces? Are there other design/development tools that I should know
> about that dovetail with POV-Ray?
> 
> Also, is there a text or document directed at children to teach them
> POV-Ray?

I'll take a swing... 

Part 1 - design/dev tools

Povray is the rendering back-end. It takes in a text file that describes the
scene and outputs the .png/.jpg/etc. You can create the text file by hand
(many people do and produce some amazing works with it), or you can use
various tools to make things easier than a basic text editor (Notepad, vi,
emacs). In my head, I've got the tools that get used along Povray somewhat
sorted as follows
- GUI Text assistance tools: these add syntax highlighting and are aware of
POV-Ray constructs, but still work in the text world. They usually run the
ray tracing portion to remove the command line confusion. Examples include
the Windows Povray GUI, QTPOV Editor, or Pyvon
- Povray Specific Modelers: these tools understand POV-Ray shapes and
features and are designed to provide a 3-D environment to graphically
create Povray scenes. Examples include KPovModeler, Y.A.P.R.M, and
Truevision
- Generic Modelers: these are 3-D modeling environments that are usually
used to create individual objects that are exported as meshes (collections
of polygons) and can be included into Povray scenes. They usually do not
understand Povray constructs beyond what is necessary to create meshes.
Examples include JPatch and Wings 3D
- Individual Objects Creators: These are smaller programs designed to
simplify creation of specific objects or scenes. Examples include Forester,
Arbaro, and POV-Tree.
- Povray scripts: Povray does have an internal scripting language and people
have written some amazing scripts to take advantage of it. Examples include
Gilles Tran's makeSnow macro.

This is not a perfect list (and there's holes), but it should be a good
summary.

Part 2 - docs for teaching kids

I'm assuming that you're looking for material that will enable you to teach
to kids, and I'm afraid this one will be much more work on your part. Most
of the web material that I've run across is focused on accomplishing
specific tasks or understanding certain Povray features (usually the more
complicated ones). It may be possible to adapt some introductory tutorials
to target a young crowd, but it would depend on the targeted age. A few
intro tutorials that I found via Google are below:
http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~y0013390/pov/ray_tutorial.html
http://library.thinkquest.org/3285/tutorial/intro.html
http://www.phong.com/tutorials/pov/intro.html
http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/basic/povtuto0.htm 
http://www.nwlink.com/~tgarwood/pov/basic.htm
http://www.nwlink.com/~tgarwood/pov/basic2.htm

Good luck!

Mike
-- 
http://povray.tashcorp.net

Post a reply to this message

In article <web.431f77feedc845503e86b3340@news.povray.org>, 
pov### [at] nicholsoncomputerconsultingcom says...
> Forgive my ignorance...
> 
> POV-Ray is very cool but is that what the gurus use to create their
> masterpieces? Are there other design/development tools that I should know
> about that dovetail with POV-Ray?
> 
At least one (and literally the best of everyone I have seen here) claims 
to do everything entirely by hand, without the use of anything but the 
text files and some editors that handle them, like the built in one for 
Windows. But yes, any development tool that exports to a form that their 
is a converter for may be used by someone here, and many export POV-Ray 
code directly (though usually not 'quite' up to date with the latest 
version).

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

Post a reply to this message