by Greetings, POV enthusiasts!
About a month or so ago, Dieter Bayer announced that the POV Team was
openning the tutorial sections of their documentation to volunteer
submissions. Being a strictly amateur C programmer myself, I found it
a great opportunity to contribute some small thing to the final POV
package, and produced a few submissions for potential tutorials.
I've since noticed that several questions have been asked about the
blob and lathe tutorials, which are two of the submissions I've made,
so, after confirming with Dieter that re-using my donated submissions
on my own web page, is okay per POVLEGAL, I have converted these
submissions to HTML form, and added pre-rendered illustrations of all
the sample codes. You can now browse these illustrated tutorials at my
web site (at least temporarily until the next release of the POV docs).
I have tried to produce tutorials that cover the basics as completely as
possible, and provide sufficient examples to make the points. The following
topics are covered at the site:
Blobs: (including an intro to blobs, component types, complex constructs
and some potential uses of negative component strengths)
Lathes, Splines & Prisms: (covers the lathe, how it differs from a SOR, a
basic "spline workshop", linear and conic prisms, how to avoid the
dreaded "Too few points in prism" error, and other gotchas.)
Layered Textures: (what they are and when you'd want to use them)
"Special" Textures: (A broad range of sub-topics including pigment_maps,
normal_maps, texture_maps, tiles, the "average" function,
material_maps, and how to get around the limitations of special
textures.)
Please, drop by and look around! The direct URL to the tutorial overview
page is...
http://www.enter.net/~cfusner/tutorial.html
Charles Fusner
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author of: Fusner's Raytrace Gallery (Newly update Dec 12)
http://www.enter.net/~cfusner/galleryn.html