"Chris Huff" wrote:
> Are you confusing me with someone else? You seem to be reacting
> as if I said your suggestions weren't any good...

Nah, I just overreacted a bit on "You're a little late..." and "All of this
was discussed". I like to think I'm contributing with new ideas. But maybe I
misunderstood how much of my message those comments applied to.

> > > You're a little late...Wlodzimierz ABX Skiba has already
> > > been working on a deform patch, which apparently can work on
> > > all objects.
> >
> > And that's great. But I believe the kind of features I
> > suggested hasn't been discussed.
>
> The patch is still in a very early stage...don't expect highly
> complex features from the start.

I don't. Actually I don't specifically have that patch in mind.

AFAIU the deform patch works on all objects, but can only do reversible
functions (so far). Also, the deformation will slow down for every ray
hitting the object.

What I'm thinking of is a feature that works on mesh-like objects only. The
good thing is that the deformation only has to be calculated for the
vertices (and vertice normals). That would happen in the parsing, not the
rendering, and thus I think it would be much faster. Also, more complicated
deformations could be done.

> > Tessellation and deformation is not the same thing. Although
> > it would indeed make deform features even more useful.
>
> What I meant was that objects can now be tesselated into meshes,
> which would be easier to deform than ordinary objects.

Exactly.

> All of this was discussed, including the possibility of
> using warps.

> Did you bother to read those threads?

Yes, but what I would like to discuss in *this* thread is not tessellation,
not deformation in general, not even warps in general, but some specific
types of deformations I've thought of. Those are the types I talked about in
the original message.

> > You snipped the most important part...
>
> Because it was long. :-)

Well, can we go back and talk about that specific part?

> > Textures and objects are entirely different things and cannot be
> > deformed in the same way.
>
> They are not entirely different...it depends on how you approach things.

I should make clear that I'm talking about deforming done by moving mesh
vertices. For this type of deform all warps would work "backwards" compared
to textures.

A turbulence warp would look almost the same to the untrained eye.
A black_hole warp would push things away instead of attracting them (except
when inverted).
A repeat warp would slice a mesh and then move all the slices to the same
location!

Some warps would be rather similar for meshes and textures, while others
would work entirely different.

> I never said that they should all be available for both, or
> that they would be identical. But for many deformations, like
> turbulence, black holes, "twist", etc... it certainly makes
> sense to use the common syntax.

Yes, even though they wouldn't give identical results, they'd look quite the
same for both meshes and textures.

But now, I will start a new branch of this thread where I hope my
field_deform idea can be discussed.

Rune
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