[ZZII 527]

Originally Posted by colt527

I guess I'll answer this one for you. POV-Ray is not what you would call a traditional modeling program, if fact, you can't really model anything at all. In order to make any shapes that get rendered you must type in everything by hand. Another important difference between POV-Ray and a traditional program such as 3DSMax is that the majority of POV-Rays shapes are rendered using math definition instead of polygons. For example you would just type in the code to make a cylinder and supply the information about the cylinder (absolute position in the world, height, radius, texture UV coordinates, material rendering properties, etc) then the renderer will render the cylinder using pure mathematics of a cylinder as opposed to a cylinder made up of hundreds of triangle polygons. So if in 3DSMax you zoom into the top a cylinder you can see distinct straight edges as in POVRay it will be perfectly smooth.

So every single shape you see modeled in those pictures are not made in some modeling program, they are defined using all code, there is no visual counterpart to what you are typing either. This makes sure that everything in the picture is perfectly exact and to scale.

I'm not the best person to answer this and I'm sure ZZII can provide a better explanation than I can, but I figured that I would save him the time.

btw, nice normal maps on the diamond plate, where did u get them from

Yes, I should give credit to colt527, who also happens to be my younger brother, for doing the diamond plate normal and the FIRST logos for me.

And his explanation is correct - everything in POV-Ray is defined mathematically, so when lighting is calculated, it's calculated using the normals of a perfect shape - no polygons. This is typical of pure ray-tracers.

There are visual modelers for POV-Ray out there. I have never used them, though.