Bald Eagle <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> 
> Blobs as the object being scanned?   Nope, I'll try that.
> 

Cool; let me know how that goes. I will try it too.

> That's a brilliant idea - I was wondering how to get into convex areas and other
> shielded places where there might be something obstructing the trace.
> I'm not at all sure how to piece together those separate trace levels smoothly.
> I still have some troubles with getting the arrays right, and avoiding
> degenerate cylinders/triangles.

I do some scanning in my snow/ice/corrosion/moss macro posted in one of the
source forums; that is my end use for whatever we can come up with.

I think I will pause my work on the rectangle packing algorithm and see
what I can come up with for the trace scan. If that can be sufficiently
generic and made a macro, it can be a good core for MANY macros which could
do very cool things.

It might even be a solved problem; Pov has been around for a while and many
smart folks have had their hands on it, I would bet someone else has
wondered exactly the same thing as we.

> Perhaps a 6-step scan from the faces of a cube would yield good results.
> 

I don't recall how I handled it in my macros, but I didn't have coverage
issues. I was coating objects with blobs and so used torii, superquads,
trees and etc as test objects.

I will take a look in a bit.

> I've also wondered about "slicing" an object, and somehow scanning the
> perimeter(s) of the slices, so that even hollow objects could be fully
> converted.

Yes that will be complex, but I think the first place to start simply to
get a good foundation before going all out would be an object constructed
of 3 torii, each oriented on a separate axis but with a common origin.

Something like a hollow box with a window in the side is going to be a
bear, but a switch to designate a hollow object and input of a vector
specifying the center of its cavity would allow you to use two separate
algorithms.

The algorithm for the interior could simply be the inverse of the one used
for the outside, as in operating on a scaled down version of the object
with the normal inverted.

> Thanks for your interest - I'm still constantly learning new things and skills.
> 

Thats why we are all here. :)

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