POV RAY (One of the few things that I don't completely hate)
POV-RAY, for those that don't know, is just a good old-fashioned ray tracer. For those that don't know, a ray tracer is a simple form of what a lot of people call a "3D renderer." It simulates objects made of simulated materials and whatnot within a given perspective, and then simulates photons bouncing off of said objects in order to produce a photorealistic image of what these objects should look like.
For a quick example of what all that crap boils down to, take a look at the image in my profile. Sure, a normal hand should not be as shiny as all that, but I'm terrible with manipulating materials, so I fixed that quality of the image by slapping a name on it. Called it "Steel Sorcerer," as it is part of a background image that I made to give a little flair to the Sorcerer GNU/Linux distribution. Soon enough, I think I'm going to break my developmental ties with Sorcerer, but that's another can of worms for another verbose rant.
The great thing about pov, in my opinion, is its scene description language. This doesn't mean much to most non-coders, but the language is remarkably similar to C/C++ and other languages that follow the general ALGOL-60 syntax. It's bloody marvelous not only for its convenience to us codemonkeys, but for the fact that it allows you to create rather complex images without having to use a modeller (WINGs3D, Maya, Bryce 3D, Blender, et cetera). This is a good thing, because even the codemonkeys that can draw fairly well, in my experience, tend to have a bit of trouble dealing with 3-space manipulations. The use of drawing as an example is bad to begin with, because this sort of thing is much more similar to sculpture, except that it's incredibly less convenient than traditional sculpture ... you only really get one point of contact with the material that you're sculpting in a 3D modelling environment.
I'm one of those types. I can draw reasonably, though I hate to think of anything that I draw as art. I can sculpt when I'm forced to, which doesn't happen much nowadays. I cannot, however, use a modelling package to save my worthless fucking life. I can cook up some mean code on occasion, though. Nobody believes me about that much at the moment, but I could really give fuck all.
There are, of course, some downers in regards to povray. Though it's kind of trite for me to bitch about a free software package in this sense, I don't know that I care for the license for it. I have more complaints, but they're nothing that I can't get over. That's the foremost complaint that I have about a lot of the shit that I'm working with at the moment ... fucking non-FSF-friendly licensing. That's one of the several reasons that I don't think I'll be helping out with Sorcerer for long, for example. I'm really not anybody to judge, but who else is going to bitch about it?
As I tend to end all of my posts to the Sorcerer development list nowadays ...
Of course, what do I know?
For a quick example of what all that crap boils down to, take a look at the image in my profile. Sure, a normal hand should not be as shiny as all that, but I'm terrible with manipulating materials, so I fixed that quality of the image by slapping a name on it. Called it "Steel Sorcerer," as it is part of a background image that I made to give a little flair to the Sorcerer GNU/Linux distribution. Soon enough, I think I'm going to break my developmental ties with Sorcerer, but that's another can of worms for another verbose rant.
The great thing about pov, in my opinion, is its scene description language. This doesn't mean much to most non-coders, but the language is remarkably similar to C/C++ and other languages that follow the general ALGOL-60 syntax. It's bloody marvelous not only for its convenience to us codemonkeys, but for the fact that it allows you to create rather complex images without having to use a modeller (WINGs3D, Maya, Bryce 3D, Blender, et cetera). This is a good thing, because even the codemonkeys that can draw fairly well, in my experience, tend to have a bit of trouble dealing with 3-space manipulations. The use of drawing as an example is bad to begin with, because this sort of thing is much more similar to sculpture, except that it's incredibly less convenient than traditional sculpture ... you only really get one point of contact with the material that you're sculpting in a 3D modelling environment.
I'm one of those types. I can draw reasonably, though I hate to think of anything that I draw as art. I can sculpt when I'm forced to, which doesn't happen much nowadays. I cannot, however, use a modelling package to save my worthless fucking life. I can cook up some mean code on occasion, though. Nobody believes me about that much at the moment, but I could really give fuck all.
There are, of course, some downers in regards to povray. Though it's kind of trite for me to bitch about a free software package in this sense, I don't know that I care for the license for it. I have more complaints, but they're nothing that I can't get over. That's the foremost complaint that I have about a lot of the shit that I'm working with at the moment ... fucking non-FSF-friendly licensing. That's one of the several reasons that I don't think I'll be helping out with Sorcerer for long, for example. I'm really not anybody to judge, but who else is going to bitch about it?
As I tend to end all of my posts to the Sorcerer development list nowadays ...
Of course, what do I know?
posted by pooster at 3:04 PM
1 Comments:
Your article is very informative and helped me further.
Thanks, David
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