"apophis13" <apo### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> Hello, I'm a high school student taking a three-week course on POVray
> programming this summer at City College in NYC. my first project was to create
> an image of an office with four tables and various objects on the tables using
> commands such as prism, lathe, sor and sphere_sweep.

Ah, a student assigned to model an office with POV-Ray... how come this sounds
familiar? :P

> I was just wondering If i could get some feedback on my first POVray
> creation. It's a messy office with books strewn all over the table (I wanted to
> practice my translating and rotating skills) and a cool blue glass vase.

Good job.

Take care with the wall we're looking at straight-on: The texture doesn't look
too good; it seems to me that you carved the whole room out of a single piece,
and we're seeing the wood grain "head on" which we're seeing from the side in
the side walls. Maybe line up the wood vertically to avoid this, or use
separate objects for the walls.

The glass vase looks cool indeed.
Maybe add some petals to the flowers.


> also, how would I make the chair's seat more rounded and comfortable-looking.
> i.e. how to make boxes more rounded at the edges, not pointy.
>
> also, how would one go about making more realistic books? perhaps I could import
> images for use as textures to put covers on the books. how do you do this?

Images for book cover textures are a good thing to add realism. To be honest,
when it comes to realistic-looking books I personally go for meshes with
UV-mapped textures, but I guess your teacher would object for didactical
reasons (which is to say, he/she probably wants you to focus on CSG, at least
for now) :)

The parts that make up your books seem a bit misaligned; the paper should recede
a bit (in your shot it instead seems to stick out); the front and rear cover
boxes seem to stick out a bit to the front and back, respectively, instead of
aligning with the cylinder used for the back. (Real books often do have a ridge
between back and cover, but it's somewhat different in placement and shape. Take
a close look at a specimen.) Furthermore, you seem to be using a solid cylinder
for the back; for better effect, you might cut it into half, and cut away
another cylinder, for better effect; non-uniform scaling to "squish" the
cylinder might add to the look, too.

As for the chair's seat: Unfortunately, POV-Ray's internals are unsuited for
automatic rounding of edges and crevices, so you need to resort to manual
rounding. The standard procedure is a clever combination of cutting away part
of the object, and replacing it with a complementarily trimmed cylinder (or
torus, if the edge follows a circular curve), adding sphere sections at corners
where multiple rounded edges meed.

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