Steve Martin <sma### [at] usitnet> wrote:
: Thanks to everyone who responded to the above. It appears
: that I was laboring under misinformation, that POV-Ray
: breaks objects down into triangles before it renders.

  Of course this is not so. If it were, there would be, of course, some
method to specify the quality of the triangulation, etc (like with
bezier patches).
  For some objects triangulation is impossible, for example the paraboloid
or the hyperboloid quadrics. (It's impossible because the area of these
surfaces is infinite.)

  What povray (and almost every raytracer) does is to mathematically
calculate the intersection of a line and the object in question (which
is only represented as a mathematical entity, not as a true object).

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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