Christopher James Huff wrote:

> In article <41ba0d45@news.povray.org>,
>  Samuel Hoffstaetter <sho### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> 
>> is there any simple way to let povray calculate the surface area and
>> volume of an object?
>> For example, for a buoy, whose mass depends on it's surface area, it's
>> displacement beneath the water surface could be calculated very easily if
>> there were functions to calculate the volume & surface area of the buoy
>> in povray.
>> of course I could calculate this manually also, but it would be a lot
>> easier if povray could do this.
> 
> There is no easy, general method for doing so, and for some objects
> there are multiple ways to define "surface area". For example, do you
> count both sides of a triangle? Do you count the inner surface of an
> open-ended cylinder? And how do you compute the area of a julia fractal?
> Volume also has some problems...not all shapes have a finite volume, and
> how do you define it for open objects?
>

too bad :-( 

> However, given some knowledge about the object, you can use the
> scripting capabilities of the POV-Ray scene description language to get
> a numeric approximation. It should be pretty easy to compute both
> surface area and volume for a more or less cylindrical shape with a few
> loops and trace() calls, for example.
> 

thanks.


-- 
You will be misunderstood by everyone.

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