Hi folks,

Given that there are a LOT of files that will need to be checked and/or
rewritten, I think it would be a good idea to know who in the community is
interested in upgrading some of the scenes, so that there is no inadvertent
duplication of effort.

After thinking about this for a while, I had the following ideas:

Since there is a list of technical specifications, perhaps the best way to
affirm that all required items exist and have the appropriate syntax and values
is to have a standard header for all of the files, listing each item, affirming
it is correct, and who checked it.

Dovetailing with this idea is that all of the files should be upgraded
aesthetically so they don't look simplistic or dated - but also that they should
all follow a common theme or "look" - marketing people would call this
"branding".

I mention this, because prior to launching into crafting a ton of scene files,
I'm thinking that perhaps the most efficient way to do this would be to have a
script prepend such a header to each file, and also have a common include file
to set up the basics of the scene, such that all the scenes will have a similar
look, and later tweaks to colors, textures, etc would easily propagate
throughout the whole of the sample scene collection.

Perhaps in the header we could have
#declare Author = "My Name";
and then the include file could be invoked after that and use the sample scene
file author's name as part of a screen.inc branding mask.

I know there are more complex scenes and other scene types where this may either
not work or have to be specially adapted, but I wanted to get some feedback from
the community, and see if we could gauge the interest and coordinate our efforts
to get the most done with the least amount of work, and still produce a nice,
updated collection of files for the current release.

There are likely several people who all have their own versions and improvements
on some of the Insert Menu files, and it would be great to share files, compare
notes, add some nice improvements, and fix some of the existing issues.

- Bill "Bald Eagle" Walker




Those interested probably want to read through the following:
https://wiki.povray.org/content/Documentation:Unix_Section_3#Rendering_the_Sample_Scenes

and perhaps someone should give the referenced shell scripts a look, just to be
on the safe side.

Is there a repository for the source files for the documentation illustrations?
Some of those might prove handy as a starting point for writing new sample
scenes.

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