Pedal

Procedural Environment Description and Animation Language

¹ped·al

('pe-d^&l) noun
Middle French pedale, from Italian, from Latin pedalis, adjective
circa. 1611

1 : a lever pressed by the foot in the playing of a musical instrument (as an organ or piano)
2 : a foot lever or treadle by which a part is activated in a mechanism

Due to my new found inability with GUI based graphic apps, and my utter failure to grasp any graphical 3d modeller (and I have tried a few) , I have decided that proceduralism is the way for me.

So hear I am with shelf loads of books on CG, more graphics libraries than I can wave a linker at, and yet still I feel something is missing. What ? I hear you cry... and the answer (One my therapist (me) assumes is related to an ongoing need to avoid whatever I am currently supposed to be doing) is yet another programming language.

My main inspiration for this is the wonderful Renderman Shading Language. For those of you unfamiliar with Renderman, or SL, the best place to start is with Larry Gritz superb Blue Moon Rendering Tools, a free implementation of the Renderman environment.

Heres the point, yes I DO have one, SL is a fully functional programming language specifically designed for describing the texturing and shading of surfaces. it is very well sutied to this task, and also serves as an excellen tool for learning about shading techniques. So the way I see it there is a gap, SL is great for textring, but hasnothing to do with modelling. So why not have an language designed for the purpose of modelling?

Before you all go screeming about Povray, I now all about POV and yes its fab, but POV is predominantly a renderer, and rendering is not my concern here,