I have thought about doing this. I already have done a few different sampling
macros. But these just generate point clouds. You can't regenerate the surface
from a point cloud; additional information is needed.
There are several methods for tessellating objects, such as marching cubes and
marching triangles.

What I've been thinking about is a method similar to marching cubes, where the
volume of the object is split into small boxes and intersections within each box
are sampled (from the centre of the box towards the corners). The pattern of
intersections should then theoretically give an approximation of the surface
passing through the sample box.
I see mainly 2 problems here:
There may be multiple intersections along a sampling interval, whereupon
sampling must be refined (recursively or otherwise).
Secondly, even simple point cloud generation is very slow in POV script, if any
level of precision is required. Tessellation would be worse.

Margus

Charles Fusner wrote:
> 
> 
> Anyway, I was thinking, wouldn't it be theoretically possible,
> using trace(), a while loop, and file i/o to "scan" user
> specified objects like a 3D scanner does and produce mesh
> output in some common format like Raw or PCM that could, in
> turn be further manipulated, or converted into other file
> formats?
>

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