From: Bob and Kelly Crispen (crispen_at_hiwaay.net)
Date: 12 February 1999
Miriam English wrote:
> >Certainly "appearance Appearance { material Material { ... } }" is ugly as
> >heck and should be immediately killed, but I doubt this is the biggest
> >stumbling block for beginners. :)
>
> [chuckle] yeah. POVRay has a much nicer language in that way (and several
> other respects).
I dunno. Sturm? Media? The difference between a color and a pigment and where surface properties go? And no texture coordinates -- what were they *thinking*? Mind you, I love POVRay, too, but it's a pain in the ass taking stuff *out* of my VRML worlds to get them to run in POV, when what I'd really hoped to be able to do was use VRML for the preliminary sketch and then do a nice rendering in POV.
> * Allied to the above point is routing and interpolation. They still
> confuse the willies outa me. I have to re-learn it every time I do
> something in it... maybe I am not that smart... or maybe it is lacking a
> little in intuitive transparency. This is one of the reasons why I made
> that post a little while back on www-vrml, suggesting that vectors could
> perhaps become a property of an object. There has just gotta be a better
> way than the current system. Maybe I will get the hang of it eventually...
It's because events are really different from anything anybody is used to. I finally got it about 6 months ago, and like a flash scribbled down a couple of tutorials. But if you approach it with a simple mind (which can be easily achieved after a few decades in a Buddhist monstery) and appreciate the true nature of an event (does a dog have event nature?) it'll stick. Just start off with the idea in mind that you don't know what events are -- that they *aren't* like anything you're familiar with, and you'll get it.
> * I, personally would like to have a reversed sound node so that a
> background noise becomes louder as you get further from a designated
> object. (You are in a building and no matter which way you leave, you hear
> the outside traffic sounds increase. You are in a meadow surrounded by
> forest, each time you approach the edge of the clearing the forest sounds
> increase in volume. You are on an island, every time you approach the shore
> the sounds of waves increases in volume.)
Imagine Steve Guynup's pig poem with a melodic or timbral element attached to each object. With MIDI, which is the only sane way to do it over the net, it can't be done.
> * a general solution to the gravity problem I mentioned in my post to
> www-vrml. This one is necessary if we don't want to perpetually put
> ourselves thru incredible contortions every time we want a character to,
> say walk down stairs, or have the object they are holding drop.
I'd like to have fetchable normals, so that when you walk up a hill your view can be tilted up and when you walk down it can be tilted down. This is an unbelievable pain right now.
[sorry for snipping so much good stuff]
> As machines become faster we approach the day when we will be able to
> raytrace scenes in real-time (this is already possible on fairly high-end
> machines). The two technologies are converging. Each technology will gain
> from the other.
Absolutely. Have you seen that VRML browser that has shadows?
You've got to pay for it, but it seems to be very cool. Real
time raytracing is definitely coming.
--
Bob Crispen
crispen_at_hiwaay.net
Son, there's two things you've got to choose between: sex and the saw.
Sex, well, nobody knows anything about that. But the saw is family.
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