clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> 
> From what I can see in that project's documentation, it only implemented
> surface shaders, not displacement shaders.
> 
> Support for true displacement is extremely hard to implement for
> arbitrary primitives. Probably the only reasonable way to get there is
> via tesselation, i.e. converting arbitrary geometry into meshes.
> 
> Parallax mapping might be a reasonably good alternative for various use
> cases.
> 

Ah, that's my luck.

I have seen some macros that allow some form of surface deformation, and
then the deformations from pigment patterns I have seen folks use seem
nice, but my goal would be something altogether more powerful and more
fully fleshed out, while occurring internally instead of by macro. 

Any reasonable progress in that direction I would be happy to add my
patronage to. I am a huge fan of true displacement. :)

> 
> Progressive tracing should be easy enough to implement once the internal
> architecture has been sufficiently cleaned up. MCPov had it, and it's
> firmy on the ToDo list for UberPOV.
> 

This is a good sign then, and perhaps due to it already being on the list
and having a source backing somewhat in place would serve to move this up
the list.

Im going to check out the other posts I missed due to nit being subbed to
this group previously, then collect what I have from those and see if we
can get some kind of rather short (less than 5 items) that are reasonable,
sizable, and that we can take and move forward on with coming up with some
first stab at with building some kind of system to go forward with.

Ian

Post a reply to this message

I concur in some respects, though keep in mind things for which they might
be willing to accept bounties is obviously completely under the control of
those actually doing the work.

I am not going to argue with them or push them. I will state my case, see
if there is any interest or takers, and go from there.

No one is forcing them to do anything, and at least initially the goal is
low hanging fruit, with discussion around bigger items to see what interest
is for both devs and users, and ultimately the devs calling the shots.

My goal is to both reward he devs and to enable things to be done which
otherwise might not be possible. They spend their time doing this work, and
if a bounty is sufficient to offset some of the personal cost from this, I
am happy to support.

As far as highest bid getting the work, well that is free market economy
for you. ;-) if someone is willing to pay then they obviously care enough
about that feature to trade their money for it, which is a completely valid
exchange.

I am not proposing small bounties either. I advocate serious bounties only;
fair ones, and if a dev and patron agree on a reasonable price for a
reasonable thing, more is the benefit for us all, as even those who did not
or could not pay benefit, and the devs get tangible rewards beyond a warm
fuzzy feeling. :)

I think though if this did take off and folks saw there is money here, it
could increase the number of devs.

On a personal note, any bounty I pay will also have a donation to the Pov
Team/org as a whole if such a thing is possible. Do they have a Patreon
page or something? I want to make sure the whole org benefits.

Maybe in future bounties there could be a % to implementing dev (the
negotiated bounty) with a fixed percent *on top of that* which goes to the
pov org overall.

Ian

Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:
> [Devils Advocate]
> 
> Yes, but...
> 
> Consider: (1) One day = 24 hours; (2) Number of people working on 
> POV-Ray << infinity; (3) Highest bid gets development priority; (4) 
> Regular POV-Ray development will slow down / be put on hold for lack of 
> manpower/womanpower.
> 
> Possible/likely scenario?
> 
> [/devils Advocate]
>

Post a reply to this message

My apologies man, I didn't know the posts were going here as my reader (iOS
NewsTap) was not subbed to this group, I intended no disrespect. :)

Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:
> Why is our community in trouble? It seems to me that over the last 
> couple of years at least there has been quite a lot of activity by our 
> respected POV-Ray developers.
> 

Beyond the google trends result that the searches for pov have decreased
100x since 2004, I am considering the volume of posts, new/extant pages
about pov or with pov content, places I see Pov mentioned around the web,
etc compared to the same from around lets say, 1994-1998 or so.

There were once numerous Pov webrings, many new folks coming through all
the time, loads of IRC activity, all kinds of unofficial patches,
specifically pov supporting shareware...substantially all of that
has...ebbed. :'-(

Us old guys and the badasses writing the code are all that is left it
seems. I have seen a lot go away over the last twenty something years.

> 
> Maybe...
> 

Anything that we can do which would drive more people to use Pov I am down
for, and I think that will be achieved through having certain (I don't have
a list) features combined with the quality of render, speed and one of the
most important things....having plugins for commonly used modeling packages
that interop with PovRay.

Getting textures from app A to render in pov...thats one hellova sticky
bit. Interop is a big, difficult thing, but ultimately you see that the
fastest growing renderers grow precisely because of the properties I listed
above.

If I am missing anything let me know.

> 
> There has been a drop of activity, mainly on the users side, with the 
> old guard turning away to other activities for instance but maybe also 
> because of age. Maybe that was due to the state-of-the-art of POV-Ray, 
> maybe not; I seem to remember some discussion about this in the past. 
> However, there has also been some new additions to the community, and I 
> think that - coming out of the "experimental" (?) stage - images have 
> become more complex/involved and/or needing more time and thought to be 
> composed. It certainly has evolved for me like that. And talking of age, 
> my own POV-Ray production is slowly dwindling over the years and that is 
> largely due to those same years accumulating on my shoulders. At 
> seventy, I am not as productive any more as I was twenty years ago.
> 

I am merely 35 (for the next few weeks lol), but I look back fondly on my
time with this community. Pov has a place, and as long as we can
strategically select and implement certain things that we know directly
influence render package adoption, as evidenced by many out there, Pov will
live.

Pov was formed under a different precept that governs recent packages,
primarily this has been discussed above already but put simply it comes
down to speed, quality and interoperability.

Pov largely has the quality, it can have the speed, and it needs the
interoperability. It has a feature set that is just awesome, and if we can
get the speed and interop part down, and get the word out, I think we will
be golden.

> 
> Again, I am not convinced personally that POV-Ray "slowly withers" but I 
> would like to hear other opinions on that.
> 

If you do not think so, go to Google trends, type in pov-ray, select from
2004 until today.

Its dire, man, dire.

It has decreased 100x.

> To me it has opened several artistic doors as it gave me the possibility 
> to express almost perfectly what I dream about.
> 

The worlds you make are pretty dang cool man. :)

Ian

Post a reply to this message

On 8-11-2016 0:05, [GDS|Enropy] wrote:
> As far as highest bid getting the work, well that is free market economy
> for you. ;-) if someone is willing to pay then they obviously care enough
> about that feature to trade their money for it, which is a completely valid
> exchange.

I don't think I need to explain what I think of free market economy... ;-)

-- 
Thomas

Post a reply to this message

On 8-11-2016 0:33, [GDS|Enropy] wrote:
> My apologies man, I didn't know the posts were going here as my reader (iOS
> NewsTap) was not subbed to this group, I intended no disrespect. :)

Ah! so my initiative was not useless after all! My instinct proved me 
true. :-)

>
> Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:
>> Why is our community in trouble? It seems to me that over the last
>> couple of years at least there has been quite a lot of activity by our
>> respected POV-Ray developers.
>>
>
> Beyond the google trends result that the searches for pov have decreased
> 100x since 2004, I am considering the volume of posts, new/extant pages
> about pov or with pov content, places I see Pov mentioned around the web,
> etc compared to the same from around lets say, 1994-1998 or so.
>
> There were once numerous Pov webrings, many new folks coming through all
> the time, loads of IRC activity, all kinds of unofficial patches,
> specifically pov supporting shareware...substantially all of that
> has...ebbed. :'-(
>
> Us old guys and the badasses writing the code are all that is left it
> seems. I have seen a lot go away over the last twenty something years.

Yes, and yes, and yes indeed. I find it truly sad and cannot explain all 
of it (see below for some thoughts about that). Partly it seems, people 
got just bored with POV-Ray when they had played extensively with it, 
and then just discarded the old toy for the next new shiny excitement of 
the day.

Talking of the IRTC, you know about the TC-RTC which replaced it? 
http://www.tc-rtc.co.uk/index/index.html and the discussions/news are 
also on irtc.general news group here. We certainly do not have a very 
large audience and participation but we struggle on...

>
>>
>> Maybe...
>>
>
> Anything that we can do which would drive more people to use Pov I am down
> for, and I think that will be achieved through having certain (I don't have
> a list) features combined with the quality of render, speed and one of the
> most important things....having plugins for commonly used modeling packages
> that interop with PovRay.
>
> Getting textures from app A to render in pov...thats one hellova sticky
> bit. Interop is a big, difficult thing, but ultimately you see that the
> fastest growing renderers grow precisely because of the properties I listed
> above.
>
> If I am missing anything let me know.
>
>>
>> There has been a drop of activity, mainly on the users side, with the
>> old guard turning away to other activities for instance but maybe also
>> because of age. Maybe that was due to the state-of-the-art of POV-Ray,
>> maybe not; I seem to remember some discussion about this in the past.
>> However, there has also been some new additions to the community, and I
>> think that - coming out of the "experimental" (?) stage - images have
>> become more complex/involved and/or needing more time and thought to be
>> composed. It certainly has evolved for me like that. And talking of age,
>> my own POV-Ray production is slowly dwindling over the years and that is
>> largely due to those same years accumulating on my shoulders. At
>> seventy, I am not as productive any more as I was twenty years ago.
>>
>
> I am merely 35 (for the next few weeks lol), but I look back fondly on my
> time with this community. Pov has a place, and as long as we can
> strategically select and implement certain things that we know directly
> influence render package adoption, as evidenced by many out there, Pov will
> live.

I certainly agree with that with all my heart.

>
> Pov was formed under a different precept that governs recent packages,
> primarily this has been discussed above already but put simply it comes
> down to speed, quality and interoperability.

I think this is the Achilles heel of POV-Ray when all, I repeat: all, 
the attention nowadays goes to game development with increasing realism 
(and speed).

>
> Pov largely has the quality, it can have the speed, and it needs the
> interoperability. It has a feature set that is just awesome, and if we can
> get the speed and interop part down, and get the word out, I think we will
> be golden.
>
>>
>> Again, I am not convinced personally that POV-Ray "slowly withers" but I
>> would like to hear other opinions on that.
>>
>
> If you do not think so, go to Google trends, type in pov-ray, select from
> 2004 until today.
>
> Its dire, man, dire.
>
> It has decreased 100x.

That is indeed quite true in the world at large; I was thinking about 
the - admittedly small - POV-Ray community. It would be worthwhile to 
dig up the discussions there have been upon this topic some years ago, 
when this was mentioned too. I don't remember exactly what was mentioned 
as causes for this but I think there was complains about "slowness", 
"involved/difficult/old-fashioned script programming", "ray-tracing not 
fashionable any more compared to other modelling developments", "useless 
for game development", and more such. They are probably still true for a 
large part of the modelling world. POV-Ray is for aficionados, the 
elite! :-)

>
>> To me it has opened several artistic doors as it gave me the possibility
>> to express almost perfectly what I dream about.
>>
>
> The worlds you make are pretty dang cool man. :)

Thanks indeed, Ian, much appreciated. The maker of SnowIce is well 
remembered by me ;-)


-- 
Thomas

Post a reply to this message

Am 08.11.2016 um 00:05 schrieb [GDS|Enropy]:

> On a personal note, any bounty I pay will also have a donation to the Pov
> Team/org as a whole if such a thing is possible. Do they have a Patreon
> page or something? I want to make sure the whole org benefits.

The POV-Ray dev team as a whole has a tradition of discouraging monetary
donations, to protect against quarrels among all the contributors over a
fair scheme for distributing such donations.

(They did put up the occasional Amazon wishlist to get a new hard drive
for the web server or a raytracing-related book for one of the team
members, but that's an entirely different matter.)


The only crowdfunding platform the POV-Ray dev team is officially
present on is an open source bounty platform where anyone can put up
bounties for any issue tracked on any GitHub project, potentially
without the project owners even knowing about this; so we officially
claimed dibs on the POV-Ray project on their platform to assert at least
a minimum degree of control over this mechanism. But currently we don't
publicly advertise our presence there.


As a member of the POV-Ray dev team, I stay in line with this policy.

As the person behind UberPOV I tend to be less picky, and had actually
set up means for people to funnel funds my way soon after the start of
that project; but out of respect for my fellow contributors I'm not
making much fuss in official POV-Ray channels about this fact (which is
probably why nothing much has come out of it previously ;)).

Post a reply to this message

Honestly to the best of my knowledge the only true free markets we have
anymore are very small scale and highly localized, representing individual
transactions between private individuals. IMO there are no current national
level examples of free market any more; it is all globalist-corporatist
combines...but that is neither here nor there lol!

Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:
> On 8-11-2016 0:05, [GDS|Enropy] wrote:
>> As far as highest bid getting the work, well that is free market economy
>> for you. ;-) if someone is willing to pay then they obviously care enough
>> about that feature to trade their money for it, which is a completely valid
>> exchange.
> 
> I don't think I need to explain what I think of free market economy... ;-)
>

Post a reply to this message

I can certainly understand and do see the intent and respect the point
behind their/your decision.

I just wish there was more I could *do*. I will never have the time to
become a contributor, unfortunately, as between work, family, and my own
projects with multiscale models of reaction-diffusion, cellular automata
and other items (a hobby which only gets an hour or two a week) my time is
just gone.

I guess the best vector for inroads will still be through UberPov, so I'm
going to back that.

Think about a list of things I could help sponsor and once we take care of
business in December we can look at starting on that list.

You are in a better position than I, to know what would do the most good.

Ian

clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Am 08.11.2016 um 00:05 schrieb [GDS|Enropy]:
> 
>> On a personal note, any bounty I pay will also have a donation to the Pov
>> Team/org as a whole if such a thing is possible. Do they have a Patreon
>> page or something? I want to make sure the whole org benefits.
> 
> The POV-Ray dev team as a whole has a tradition of discouraging monetary
> donations, to protect against quarrels among all the contributors over a
> fair scheme for distributing such donations.
> 
> (They did put up the occasional Amazon wishlist to get a new hard drive
> for the web server or a raytracing-related book for one of the team
> members, but that's an entirely different matter.)
> 
> 
> The only crowdfunding platform the POV-Ray dev team is officially
> present on is an open source bounty platform where anyone can put up
> bounties for any issue tracked on any GitHub project, potentially
> without the project owners even knowing about this; so we officially
> claimed dibs on the POV-Ray project on their platform to assert at least
> a minimum degree of control over this mechanism. But currently we don't
> publicly advertise our presence there.
> 
> 
> As a member of the POV-Ray dev team, I stay in line with this policy.
> 
> As the person behind UberPOV I tend to be less picky, and had actually
> set up means for people to funnel funds my way soon after the start of
> that project; but out of respect for my fellow contributors I'm not
> making much fuss in official POV-Ray channels about this fact (which is
> probably why nothing much has come out of it previously ;)).
> 
>

Post a reply to this message

On 8-11-2016 20:22, [GDS|Enropy] wrote:
> Honestly to the best of my knowledge the only true free markets we have
> anymore are very small scale and highly localized, representing individual
> transactions between private individuals. IMO there are no current national
> level examples of free market any more; it is all globalist-corporatist
> combines...but that is neither here nor there lol!

Sorry, but you need to wake up. I could cite numerous examples from 
large (steel; transportation) to small (garlic) where a dramatic drop in 
quality can be monitored in my country over the past 10 years. Not to 
speak about the rise of corruption. All mostly the result of increasing 
free-market economy regulations by the government.

However, we drift off.... :-)

>
> Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:
>> On 8-11-2016 0:05, [GDS|Enropy] wrote:
>>> As far as highest bid getting the work, well that is free market economy
>>> for you. ;-) if someone is willing to pay then they obviously care enough
>>> about that feature to trade their money for it, which is a completely valid
>>> exchange.
>>
>> I don't think I need to explain what I think of free market economy... ;-)
>>
>
>
>


-- 
Thomas

Post a reply to this message

clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Am 08.11.2016 um 00:05 schrieb [GDS|Enropy]:
>
> > On a personal note, any bounty I pay will also have a donation to the Pov
> > Team/org as a whole if such a thing is possible. Do they have a Patreon
> > page or something? I want to make sure the whole org benefits.
>
> The POV-Ray dev team as a whole has a tradition of discouraging monetary
> donations, to protect against quarrels among all the contributors over a
> fair scheme for distributing such donations.
>
> (They did put up the occasional Amazon wishlist to get a new hard drive
> for the web server or a raytracing-related book for one of the team
> members, but that's an entirely different matter.)

Oh yeah, if I remember this, I bought a book for Chris Cason. Looking at
amazon.com I still see "POV-Ray Team Co-ordinator" in the Your Friends list.
Other than that I only see a couple buys for myself, Ray Tracing Creations (two
from 2001, 2006) and the Ray Tracing Worlds books (2006).

And there was that great key fob made possible by some people. I bought 3 so I
could give one away and put another away to be untouched over time. Other than
that I hadn't put any money toward POV-Ray... until now.

> The only crowdfunding platform the POV-Ray dev team is officially
> present on is an open source bounty platform where anyone can put up
> bounties for any issue tracked on any GitHub project, potentially
> without the project owners even knowing about this; so we officially
> claimed dibs on the POV-Ray project on their platform to assert at least
> a minimum degree of control over this mechanism. But currently we don't
> publicly advertise our presence there.

I will look at that, too, besides only GoFundMe for UberPOV.

Offering inclusion in the About POV-Ray pop-up by scrolling a list of donor
names seems like a nice way to keep things going... if this kind of thing is an
okay idea.

> As a member of the POV-Ray dev team, I stay in line with this policy.
>
> As the person behind UberPOV I tend to be less picky, and had actually
> set up means for people to funnel funds my way soon after the start of
> that project; but out of respect for my fellow contributors I'm not
> making much fuss in official POV-Ray channels about this fact (which is
> probably why nothing much has come out of it previously ;)).

#default{pigment{blue 1}}#for(I,-1,1,1)
#if(I!=0)cylinder{<I-.3,0,3>,<I-.3,1,3>,.2}#end
sphere{<I-.1,0,3>,.4}#end//bob

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