Lance Birch wrote in message <36e8aaf3.0@news.povray.org>...
<snip>
>Basically what it would mean is the the renderer would have to (when it hit
>the texture with the erode keyword on whatever colour you've chosen) keep
>tracing the path until it hit an area of a different colour (determine the
>colour of each point through the object).  The problem with this is, while
>it being very slow, it also has to have a way to determine if it's actually
>hit the colour boundary... for instance, you could have an erode fade to a
>solid colour, in which case the renderer would have to do a huge amount of
>work!!!

I take your point, though I had envisaged it only working in a color_map where clean
steps
are used, not fades.

>Also, it then has to determine a surface normal for this newly
>found point of colour which would be nearly impossible!

Would that still be the case if fading was not used, just clean steps of colour?

<snip>
>Lance.


I'm not at all conversant with the inner workings of POV, so whilst my suggestion made
perfect sense to me, as you point out, I'm probably asking the impossible. I just
thought
it was so simple
ie

pigment {bozo
color_map {
[0 Erode]
[0.5 Erode] // clean step
[0.5 rgb 1]
[1 rgb 1]
}
}

    When shooting rays at the surface, where Erode is found, the ray enters the object
until it hits a color_map entry other than Erode ( procedural textures occupy 3d space
I
think ). This point then becomes the surface of the object. Surely the surface normal
of
this point could be worked out by sampling the position of the surrounding points ( no
idea personally of the math of what I'm suggesting here, but it makes sense to me ;~)
).
If this was workable, I don't see it being neccessarily as slow as media, depending on
the
scale of the pigment used.

I think that such a feature would be fantastic, so forgive me for pursuing the point.

---------
Andy

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