Hmm, that's interesting, cause I've always found it faster... in both
modelling and rendering.  Just going back to the point before though, I
understand that inherently MAX is faster because it is a scan-line renderer,
but you also have to remember that MAX has adaptive degredation, so no
matter how far you zoom in it will compensate by interpolating the faces and
recalculating the object.  This is especially useful in NURBS modelling (for
obvious reasons).

MAX can also do raytracing though, it just uses the scan-line renderer, but
when it calls the texturing function, that's where the raytracing is done
(and it is very accurate BTW, it can do a lot of really cool things too,
like reflective defusion, distance bluring, flurescence etc).

Most of the time I'm modelling with NURBS, where it is impossible to have a
real primitive.  Personally of course I like the idea of real primitives
because they are accurate and allow easy booleaning.

BUT!  Back to the question at hand of course (LOL, "you know you've been
raytracing too long when you get in a flame war over rendering programs..."
he he he)

It still, if you didn't want to do it the mesh way that is, should be
possible to incorporate this feature into POV-Ray.  I know the Isosurface
patch can do it with its bump mapping (as in, formula based displacement),
so surely if you created a few new mapping types and created a displacement
function based on the intensity of an image it should be possible... Of
course there's no way I could do it, I'm not a brilliant programmer like all
the poeple on the POV-Team :-)

Back to the mesh idea though, as long as the function was well written there
shouldn't be problems with surface normals...  I don't think that it would
be too hard (given a person that is a good programmer) to create a function
that would auto-interpolate an object to the correct amount...  Of course
this kind of advanced macroing would require some extra keywords to be built
into POV-Ray, such as object intersection, etc etc etc.

Anyway, just a thought... Also, isn't there an external program which can do
this?  I can't remember the name of it... and it's only to meshes of
course...

--
Lance.

BTW, anyway how wants to see what MAX can do, go to
www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/parallax/359/maxgallery.html

---
For the latest 3D Studio MAX plug-ins, images and much more, go to:
The Zone - http://come.to/the.zone

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