Keith Lofstrom wrote: > I suggest you download the pdf documents from the POVray website; > easier to read and navigate, IMHO . > > ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/Official/Documentation/povdoc-3.6.1-us-pdf.zip > > This contains both the 420 page reference manual and the 276 > page tutorial. There are also Tex and PS versions in that same > directory. >
Got them. Thanks. A little light reading for laundry day, tomorrow. > Note that a lot of the tutorial examples are code fragments buried > in the text, not available online AFAIK. So, you get to do copy > and paste, and often figure out the lights and camera yourself. > > I just started playing with POVray this week, and will be making > a heck of a lot of POVray output over the next month. Perhaps > we ought to team together to solve problems and learn things. > I may still have some old POVray DOS floppies from the 1980's when I had to order share ware by mail. I never had a machine fast enough to do anything useful with them. I'm looking forward to developing some photo realistic images for a project. I'll be happy to share anything I learn. > Other POVray notes: > > In many cases it is easier to learn specific things by looking at > other people's .pov and .ini files, and the drawings that they make. > Then tweak the parameters and see what happens. > That is the way I have usually learned programming related stuff. I look at what someone else did in a book, and then adapt it to what I want to do. Along the way, I sometimes learn something useful, too. > Realism is costly. The rendering time difference between > "understandable" and "photorealistic" can be seconds to days. > Much of the POVray community seems committed to the latter, so > they will suggest things like Rayleigh atmospheric scattering > media to get pictures Just Right, even though that is enormously > more costly (hours) than absorption and emission (seconds). OTOH, > they make some beautiful pictures ... > Kind of like building solid models in wire frame to get the geometry right before running the rendering engine on one of the old CAD systems I used to use. > Finally, POVray doesn't make animations directly - just a sequence > of numerically ordered images you can turn into an animation with > other tools. I make SWF movies for the web with the open source > SWFTOOLS. > My initial interest is in photo realistic stills. But one day I might want to do some animations. I'm looking forward to the journey. -- Regards, Dick Steffens www.dicksteffens.com _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
