In article <3e0ed4c5$1@news.povray.org> , "Martijn van den Branden" 
<m.v### [at] studenttudelftnl> wrote:

> i'm a complete newbie to povray, hence this
> question: i don't understand the 'smooth' mesh2
> example in the pov-doc (included below).
> It says in order to create a 'smooth' mesh,
> you have to include vertex normals. i can only
> think of 1 normal, that is the one perpendicular
> to the whole plane (made up by the triangles).
> What do these vertex normals do? when
> i render the scene below with some light_source
> , i get a plane 'warped' on the top side, which

Well, as the name says, each vertex (corner) of a triangles gets its own
normal that are then interpolated over the whole triangle surface.  This
gives the impression of a smooth surface as for example the reflection
behaves as if the surface was smooth.

> i think is my videocard (tnt-1) going bezerk.

I think you misunderstand how ray-tracing works.  Also not relevant to this
question, you may want to read
<http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/328/>.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich
e-mail: mac### [at] povrayorg

I am a member of the POV-Ray Team.
Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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