On Sun, 18 Apr 1999 07:39:36 GMT, pet### [at] usanet (Peter Popov)
wrote:

>If I have gotten your idea correctly, it will not be
>able to either reproduce the internal structure of the desired object

Depending on the interior structure you have in mind, it certainly
could.  Say you have a hollow sphere, made of two concentric rings of
bicubic patches.  If the macro were coded correctly, it would in fact
trace a ray to the first intersection, then start another ray just
past that intersection tracing in the same direction, etc.  In fact,
I never seriously considered any other way of doing it.

If you're talking about an object that is not closed and otherwise
well-behaved (i.e. no patches with 'bare' edges) then no, it won't
work, but then neither will any other method.

>nor the texture / interior.

This is true as well.  One could, of course, create a .df3 of a block
of any given pigment, then write a quickie program to perform a
logical 'and' between corresponding elements of the two resulting 
files.  

Besides, everything being discussed in this thread is only useful for
a very small fraction of .df3 applications.  I haven't yet seen anyone
even scratch the surface of what these things are good for.  What I
want to see is a big pile of utilities, like the pbm utils, but
operating on .df3 files - smooth, sharpen, general convolutions... the
sky's the limit.

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