"Hugo Asm" <hua### [at] post3teledk> wrote in message
news:3f61af0f@news.povray.org...
|
| I have no problem with letting POV win! But I'm a little
| confused when you say "all of the vertices are evenly spaced".
| I thought the idea was to reduce the number of vertices with
| an adaptive method like Max offers.

My goal was to reduce the number of vertices, but I did so *by* evenly
distributing them. In a standard height field, there are more faces on
the horizontal areas than on the vertical. This means that a person is
forced to have a super concentration of vertices on the horizontal areas
in order to have even a few vertices along a very steep area. If a
heightfield has an area which is completely vertical, then the
traditional height field method will put no vertices in this area at
all.

The wire I have attached probably shows it better than I can tell it. As
you can see, even the faces on the steep edges are shaped nicely due to
the faces' vertices being no more farther apart than the vertices of the
faces on the horizontal areas. As you can see, it would even be simple
to form overhangs in this landscape by moving the vertices in the
vertical or near vertical areas.

| But perhaps your goal was to remove the stepping artifacts.
| I can imagine after that, the grid does not have to be so
| dense. At least in this particular example. But what about
| HF's with greater variation in detail? (some areas with lots
| of detail)  I'm not sure how well these would be preserved in Max
| either, if I have to remove noise & artifacts at the same time.

One could easily produce a landscape mesh in pov with smaller triangles
in areas of high detail, along the horizon line, near the camera, etc..
This is where you really do need a function instead of a map, however,
as noise would be indistinguishable from fine features. It's not
something I'd bother with anyway, as I am only interested in creating
inorganic models. I also like to produce models which can be viewed from
any direction, so having an arrangement of vertices which follows the
contours of a shape is more important to me than the savings gained by
using a stingy triangulation method.

| I'm impressed if your version contains roughly the same amount
| of vertices as mine. There are more details left in yours, and
| it's an advantage with a mountain-like HF like this. Can we get
| a version without normals?

I attached a low resolution wire below, but it's not terribly
interesting, as few changes in resolution were needed due to the
relatively non-steep inclines. This isn't a great example because the
standarh height field algorithm could have handled this one fairly well.

Btw: How did you like the jagginess filter?

 -Shay

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