I enjoy diving into POV-Ray these days. It's a fun way to get away from GUI-driven work I might do in other 3D software.
One cool thing about the experience of using POV is that you can scroll in one dimension and see the entire organization of elements that will become a sensory window into the imagination. If you can learn the syntax and options, you can effectively break down what would otherwise be many different sets of interfaces and gain an enhanced feeling of accessibility.
If you combine this with an appreciation for abstraction-focused scene modeling, you can reach this point of really amazing emotion where you realize you can create or model _anything_ with the provided tools, as long as you can embrace the need for abstraction as its own sort of user-mindset technology.
The closest analog that comes to mind outside of 3D would be MacPaint, MS Paint, Grafx2...if you've ever seen someone seriously plan their home garden or design a home theater in one of those apps, and then build the damn thing in real life, you may know what I'm talking about.
Outside of that...maybe something like watching a concept designer use a bic crystal pen to sketch out an entire world on newsprint.
With POV-Ray I find myself honing in on something like an intuitive feel for how much abstraction to employ to simply and effectively depict what I want to depict, given any time constraints. It's really cool to reach that point no matter the tool. I'm sure a lot of people feel similar feelings about their favorite programming tools as well.
Comments
I enjoy diving into POV-Ray these days. It's a fun way to get away from GUI-driven work I might do in other 3D software.
One cool thing about the experience of using POV is that you can scroll in one dimension and see the entire organization of elements that will become a sensory window into the imagination. If you can learn the syntax and options, you can effectively break down what would otherwise be many different sets of interfaces and gain an enhanced feeling of accessibility.
If you combine this with an appreciation for abstraction-focused scene modeling, you can reach this point of really amazing emotion where you realize you can create or model _anything_ with the provided tools, as long as you can embrace the need for abstraction as its own sort of user-mindset technology.
The closest analog that comes to mind outside of 3D would be MacPaint, MS Paint, Grafx2...if you've ever seen someone seriously plan their home garden or design a home theater in one of those apps, and then build the damn thing in real life, you may know what I'm talking about.
Outside of that...maybe something like watching a concept designer use a bic crystal pen to sketch out an entire world on newsprint.
With POV-Ray I find myself honing in on something like an intuitive feel for how much abstraction to employ to simply and effectively depict what I want to depict, given any time constraints. It's really cool to reach that point no matter the tool. I'm sure a lot of people feel similar feelings about their favorite programming tools as well.