DustBuster wrote:

> I need a rope in one of my scenes. To make it look like a rope, it needs a
> few bends here and there. I could of course paste torus-pieces together but
> that's gonna take six years, eight days and three hours. Is there a better
> way to do it?

If you're using Megapov, there's a sphere_sweep object that can make nice
ropes.
You can also make a procedure that concatenates spheres and/or cylinders if you
know your way in pov programming.
If you happen to be a Poser user, there are some poseable rope objets at the
www.renderosity.com site.

> BTW, is there a way to twist things?

There's no good way to twist things because it falls in the category of
"non-linear transformations" that are difficult to implement in raytracing.
You can twist a mesh by using one of Chris Colefax's mesh macros.
For any other primitive, the only way is to cut it in thin slices and rotate
each slice by an increment. If you're a Megapov user with some good math
background you can create twisted primitives using isosurfaces. There's an
isosurface that looks like a twisted rope, btw.

G.

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