Grrrr... I spent 20 minutes making a reply, then AOL crapped out.
>It's been years since I played with POV, but the /. announcement of a
>new official release (3.5, www.povray.org) got me to download it and
>play around a bit last night.
I used to spend hours with POV. (And, if you have ever tried to do raytracing
on a 25 MHz 030, with an emulated FPU, you know you *have* to spend hours at
it.) Hell, I still miss Moray. Moray on my 100 MHz Win95 box with POV 3.0 was
the sweetest thing in the world for CSG modelling. Beats the pants off of CSG
in LW, lemme tell you that.
Quote:>Damn.
>That sucker has some very nice rendering features and a very clean UI
Yeah, most command line renderers do have a clean UI... :) ( I made a more
elaborate joke in my first reply, but alas, it's lost forever...)
Quote:>plus lots of online documentation. The Radiosity looks especially nice
>and appears to have potential advantages over LW in terns of speed:quality
>tradeoffs.
As I recall, 3.5 is all the stuff that MegaPOV had, plus more. With some of
that stuff, I have to admit, despite my having badmouthed POV in the past, it
is a pretty nice little renderer. Certainly, it's capable of putting out some
top notch pictures with somebody worth his salt using it.
Quote:>I realize this is a heretical question, but are there any good tools for
>converting LW scenes and objects into POV format?
>G.
The 5.6 era formats are well known. The new 6.0 stuff less so. Don't expect
things like particles to convert over, unless you roll your own converter. I
used to use 3DWin as my converter of choice when POV was my renderer of choice.
I think it's not still free, but it is still being developed, because I saw a
post about it a few days back.
At this point in my first reply, I started talking about RenderMan. I won't
ramble on for as long as I did last time, but...
-BMRT and other implimentations don't cost anything.
-Shading language is the real ultimate power.
-Displacement mapping is spiffy. (No, not like Lightwave's displacement
mapping... Real displacement mapping.)
-Procedural geomtry is frigging useful.
In POV, you obviously have POV script, which is useful, but not the best thing
in the world. Certainly, it is a little more convenient than the C bindings
for RenderMan, and less scary, but RenderMan is better. You can use the
RenderMan bindings ina variety of languages, and you get the full power of a
real programming language, which POV script doesn't have.
If procedural geometry doesn't float your boat, it should. There have been
plenty of times when I did something by hand in LW that took days, which would
have taken a half hour as a script. (And, indeed, took about a half hour when
I went back and redid them out of curiosity...) The possibilities are endless.
So, in conclusion, POV is cool, RenderMan is cooler, and I need a job. Okay,
so it's a terribly blunt segue. I just got to Denver a few days ago.
Personally, I would be content to just work on my demo reel all summer, and not
worry about work for a few months, but I only have 21 dollars in my pocket, and
there's this girl... (Oh, wait, certainly don't want to restart *that*
thread...).
Anyhow, if anybody is looking for an extra pair of hands, or knows of anybody
who is, feel free to drop me a line.
------------------
Anybody need an extra pair of hands near Denver? I'm handy, and I have 20
dollars in my pocket, so feel free to drop me a line.
by