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| AMATEUR'S ANECDOTES |
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Fuzzy Dice and Wool Seat Covers
Written by Philip M. Ware
vol. I, article 3
Fuzzy Dice and Wool Seat Covers
It's been some time since I dug out my POV-Ray stuff and actually messed with it. It's from this program that you learn to appreciate how cushy the interface-driven programs are. Granted, POV-Ray 3.1 is an interface-driven program, but to a certain extent. The GUI-ness of the program ends at the push buttons on the main window. The rest of the interface is a text-editor whereby you modify the parameters and tweak the settings on the many, many objects in your scene. This, to a lot of renderers - especially, the old schoolers - is how it should be done. They don't want drag and drop creation of objects. They don't want all the automation that programs like 3DStudioMax, LightWave and TrueSpace have killed themselves to produce. I'm not one of these folks.
I'm quasi-old-school. I started rendering using TurboSilver on my Amiga back in 1990. Then, there was Imagine. Somewhere in there, I learned how to use the incredibly obtuse ScupltAnimate3D and 4D programs. We always drooled over Caligari24 and the VideoToaster, but those were way out of our league. Then, my Amiga died and I got PC'd. It was like returning to the stone age. I didn't have more than 16 colors until 1993! At any rate, there were always two alternatives for PC users: Persistence of Vision and RayDream. Through some wacky 3D mating ritual, there begot POV-Ray, and it was all good for those who didn't want to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars and still get some of the best ray-traced images out there.
Well, I've been spoiled. I've been using Lightwave5.0 and 3DStudioMax2.0 almost exclusively for almost two years, now(well, not Max2, for obvious reasons), and I am spoiled. There's no doubt that hopping into Modeler or the lofter that I have power at my fingertips and I don't really have to think about it all that hard to make an object look right or get the lighting perfect or the camera in a useable location pointing at the right angle.
These are all things I have come to appreciate since I started using POV-Ray again. What? I'm using POV-Ray again? That's right. In a situation where it wouldn't have been practical to install 3DMax or LightWave on my system, POV-Ray for Windows fit the bill. It is, however, slower to use and a heck of a lot less friendly. The parser is just mean. It doesn't tell you much aside from what blew up and where. It's very kind in that it points out your mistake, but it's not a given that you'll be able to figure out why it's wrong. At least LightWave will render it anyway, even if it comes out looking freaky. When PR3.1 does render, however, the results are usually spectacular. Granted, the rendering engine isn't as fast as the Max2 engine or the LW5 engine, but it produces visually stunning images with the best of them. A note to NewTek - I still haven't been able to produce metal that looked as much like metal as in POV-Ray. TrueSpace came close, but not really, and 3DMax2 does a decent job.
So, what I'm saying is that comfort isn't everything. The fuzzy dice in Max2 can't compete with the product/price ratio that POV-Ray sports. The wool seat covers in LightWave can't create realistic looking metal without expensive plugins or hours of tweaking the specularity/reflectivity sliders. POV-Ray might be just be the Saturn of rendering tools while it's expensive cousins Lexus (LightWave) and Mercedes (Max2) are starting to see that luxury is relative. I installed POV-Ray 3.1 in under 4 minutes and there's no stinkin' dongle. With modelers like Breeze and the revamped PovSB sporting OpenGL support - where's the need for the expensive models? The fact that POV-Ray is free and supported on just about every platform (I didn't see AS/400 listed…) makes it a very attractive competitor. It's what I started with on my PC, and I may have just rediscovered its beauty.
Would you like to add, share, or correct some information? 3D ARK welcomes your contributions. Send mail to: webmaster@3dark.com
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