"kennebel" <jac### [at] kennebelcom> wrote:
> "Bruno Cabasson" <bru### [at] cabassoncom> wrote:
> > But it is also a weak point because 3D artists are not programmers
> > (to my opinion). So, if the language itself were more 'accessible' to the many,
> > perhaps artists would be less reluctant to dive into POV-Ray. To give it a new
> > interest, making the language itself more 'attractive' would serve POV-Ray's
> > purpose.
>
> I am genuinely curious if you have worked with digital artists before.
>
> 2 jobs ago for me, I ran the IT department for a small digital art studio. Had
> about 25 artists doing 2D and 3D work. For our software inventory we had Maya,
> 3DS Max, Adobe Creative Suite, ZBrush, Unity 3D, and so many plug ins (around
> 200 or so covering effects, pipeline management, and other utilities). The
> company did a mix of legal cases, marketing, movie work (as a secondary
> studio), and other things.
>
> Any conversation with the artists, if it didn't start with how the tool worked
> with their Wacom tablet and special smart pens, was a non-starter. The tablet
> was closest to the artist, keyboard was in between the tablet and monitor (not
> easy to type on, for occasional shortcuts), the mouse was pushed off to the
> side. It was amazing how much work they could do with the smart pen buttons and
> the buttons on the tablet.
>
> Basically at no point will a language change entice the artistic folks
> unfortunately. The artists have tens of thousands of hours on their tablets,
> practically extensions of their will, and all of the plugins available for the
> other tools. Tools like Blender that are similar to what they already use has
> almost no adoption because it lacks the pipeline and plugins.
>
> I really like the direction of your ideas for extending the language. I would
> like to see new changes like this to be a super set of the SDL. Meaning, like
> C++ or Typescript, you can use the classic SDL (c or javascript), or you can use
> the advanced syntax for more complex efforts.

Hi! Thanks for your comments. Indeed.

As a former software engineer in the space industry for 30 years, I did not work
with 3D artists. Just POVing for fun for years (since ... I do not remember) and
having an eye to 3D world, watching tutorials by curiousity and intellectual
challenge.

A few years back, I was thinking about writing some Python classes, close to
Sdl, that could permit you to describe your scenes and, in fine, generate POV
code. The quite new dictionary data structure gave me the idea that it could
eventually be possible to describe classes and  instances with dictionaries in
Sdl itself. So I had it a try.

Currently, I am unit-testing my core PROOF code. Then, I will try to write some
illustrative examples of how to use classes to improve and extend POV obects as
well as their behaviour. For example, I can imagine classes that helps you
visualize Bounding Boxes (if useful), place your objects in your scenes (use of
trace(), which cannot be done outside the parser without rewriting intersection
test code), implement animation features like attach timelines to properties,
event-driven behaviours (through subscriptions for example ...), whatsoever. I
am also thinking of a basic physics package ... why not.

In addition, having MegaPOV's motion blur, UberPOV's unbiased radiosity
(no_cache keyword) would increase the scope of POV-Sdl compared to other 3D
softwares. Also, some practical tools like the old 'spilin' spline generator
would be welcome if shipped (with due credits) with POV-Ray (or integrated to
it).

Again, what I can write in POV-Sdl, the parser could do it natevly with
apropriate evolutions.

Regards

    Bruno

PS : A few time ago, many of us were thinking of GPU computing. This has been
discussed many times.

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