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Subject: 
Re: A few ideas to toss around.
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Tue, 18 Feb 2003 02:53:37 GMT
Viewed: 
827 times
  
In lugnet.cad, Miguel Agullo writes:

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

Hey cool! I had Blender installed at one time, but never got around to
learning how to use it. This might be a good time to start.

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.

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.

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/

Thanks for that link. Looks like some interesting possibilities there.

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.

Sometimes I set the camera radius wrong and get that :)

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.

Which is what prompted my original post. POV's text interface is a bit
arcane to say the least, but you've provided some interesting links that
I'll definitely investigate further. Thanks.

Allister



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: A few ideas to toss around.
 
(...) Actually, a much better solution would be to scrap POV altogether and go with Blender or something of the kind (URL) reasoning behind it is that POV is the worst possible way of learning 3D rendering. Placing the lights illustrates why very (...) (22 years ago, 13-Feb-03, to lugnet.cad)

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