Shay wrote:
> 
> Tor Olav Kristensen <tor### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message
> news:3CBDEADA.E12E0676@hotmail.com...
> 
> As usual, your image inspires me to do a little reading and research.

I'm happy to hear that my image inspires you !


> If Pov's parsing speed is too slow for multi-dimensional functions,
> would it be difficult to parse these functions in another language
> and return mesh points?

Yes, I think that this would be good way to
explore such functions.

But I think that much depends upon the
programming language you use.

POV-Ray's scripting language let you build
arbitrary functions "on the fly" and then
use them right afterwards. (So in this context
the POV-language is quite powerful.)

In many languages you'll have to make the
function building mechanisms yourself, and
I would expect that to be a lot of work.

POV-Ray is made with C. But I don't know how
the function building is done within POV-Ray
at run time.

Hmmm... Maybe POV-Ray has a built in C-
compiler ?  Or maybe someone has made a
library for an advanced virtual stack based
calculator ?  Somebody please enlighten me !

> Also, it appears that your function has produced some *almost* redundant
> spheres. I can see rows that look as if they disappear into the "surface" of
> the shape. Is this truly the case?

The "solid" shape shown is really a 3D grid 
of 80x80x80 spheres. Most of the visible ones
are at the surface. But it might be that some
of the interior ones are "pulled" to the
outside of the shape.

The control points that controls this "shape"
lies in a kind of cube grid.

Each of them pulls a volumetric region the
shape towards them. Since I have randomly
displaced each of the control points quite a
distance from its "original" location in the
grid, some of the surface of the shape will
"fold back on itself". (I think that this is
not possible with isosurfaces.) So some of
the spheres will seem to be located in nearly
the same position.

I think I'll have to make a little macro to
show a 3D cylinder-grid of the interior of
my shape.


> I got a good (perhaps) idea for a new surface today at work, hopefully I
> will have something to post tomorrow if I can get a chance to do some Poving
> tonight.

Happy rendering then !
- And please show us the result if it turns out nice !


Tor Olav


P.S.:
I have read that IRIT can handle trivariate
NURBS functions. It is a (scriptable) solid
modeller. And it is free of charge for non-
commercial use.

http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~irit/

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