Subject:
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Re: A few ideas to toss around.
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad
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Date:
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Thu, 13 Feb 2003 17:24:14 GMT
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Viewed:
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383 times
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In lugnet.cad, Allister McLaren writes:
> Here's my idea. How about a similar part for some of the other lights
> available in POV? I don't know quite how the process works, but my guess is
> that all ldraw would need is a copy of light.dat renamed to the various
> light types eg. spotlight.dat, arealight.dat, cylinderlight.dat etc. The
> translation into POVspeak would presumably happen within L3P. I guess the
> directional lights will need two points (origin and target) as well. Maybe a
> cone shaped part would work best.
Actually, a much better solution would be to scrap POV altogether and go
with Blender or something of the kind
http://news.lugnet.com/cad/dev/?n=8296
The reasoning behind it is that POV is the worst possible way of learning 3D
rendering. Placing the lights illustrates why very well.
Placing lights is a delicate, iterative process. I can easily keep a sketchy
representation of a 3D scene in my head, but not to the detailed extent
needed for a top-of-the-line lightning scheme. Which is why most 3D programs
use a WYSIWYG user interface.
Spots not only require target and point-at coordinates, but also radius,
falloff and tightness parameters. Shall we scrap spots because they are too
complex? In fact, using well placed spots will *decrease* rendering times,
as less light rays are taken into consideration. Spots should be the most
common lights in our scenes, yet they are rarely ever present because they
are really hard to figure out in POV, specially if you have not used another
3D program before. In WYSIWYG rendering environments, however, they are dead
easy to comprehend.
And there are other parameters such as "shadowless", etc.
Ideally, the way to go is use a lightning environment similar to the
modeling environment (i.e. where you can *see* what you are doing before
rendering it). In this sense, there are several shareware modelers for POV
that will probably help with the task - Make sure that the they can load and
display properly POV data, something considerably more complicated than
simply saving POV data.
PC:
http://www.povray.org/resources/links/3D_Programs/POV-Ray_Modelling_Programs/
MAC:
http://mac.povray.org/tools_links/modelers.html
>
> While I'm on the subject, a similar thing could probably be done for the camera.
I've always wondered why light parts and not camera. Maybe because automatic
camera placement is more user-friendly than letting the user bury the camera
directly inside a brick and leave him or her wondering why POV only spits
out black images.
>
> All this would mean that stunning results could be had using a simple
> graphic interface and without having to delve too deeply into POVs language.
Many of the concepts that you quickly learn playing around with MLCad or
Leocad have a direct application in general 3D computer graphics. With POV,
you don't have the oppotunity to play around before you're pretty familair
with the help file. And then half the actions needed to achieve our
objectives are completely useless outside POV.
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: A few ideas to toss around.
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| (...) learning how to use it. This might be a good time to start. (...) Which is why I like placing them in MLCAD. I move the light, run it through L3PAO, extract the coordinates into my light settings and render. It's all a bit cumbersome though. (...) (21 years ago, 18-Feb-03, to lugnet.cad)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | A few ideas to toss around.
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| Hello, I've been having a lot of fun recently trying out new lighting arrangements in my CAD models. The results have been pleasing, but not all that easy for someone as unfamiliar with the POV language as I am. I've found the easiest way to set up (...) (21 years ago, 12-Feb-03, to lugnet.cad)
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