On Wed, 1 Apr 1998 20:37:30 +0200, mbr### [at] swipnetse (Mathias Broxvall)
wrote:

>Or better yet, we
>can add a function to povray which allows one to get the next 
>intersection of a specified ray with a set of objects. The later 
>solution would be preferable since it could be used for a lot of things
>(if think it have been suggested before in povray.programming).

I'm the one who suggested this on povray.programming.  I've kinda
halted efforts on my superpatch project until V3.1 comes out, but I
was planning to include such a thing in it.  It's not that difficult
to do, and if someone really, really needs it I can take a couple of
hours and code it up.

>Does anyone feel the surge to implement this and to specify a nice
>syntax for it? 

I like trace( <origin-vector>, <direction-vector> ) or the alternate
form, trace( <origin-vector>, <direction-vector>, <#declared-object>).
This way, you can check for any intersection, or just ones with a
specified object.

>(And while your at it, why not throw in a function to
>get the gradient at a specified point for a given object...)

Assuming you really meant to say the normal vector, this isn't too
bad, either.  The syntax would be something along the lines of
normvect( <#declared-object>, <point-vector> ).  I'm not happy with
the "normvect" word, but "normal" is already taken.

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