"David El Tom" <dav### [at] t-onlinede> wrote in message 
news:432d2eb9@news.povray.org...
> Hi there,
>
> while working on something hairy, I stumbled over several includes and 
> macros available throughout the net. But unfortunately all seem to work 
> only in conjunction with external programs like the MeshCompressor (by C. 
> Colefax if I renember wright).
>
> Is it possible (or planned) to access the internal data structure of a 
> mesh through SDL. (like MESH_IDENTIFIER.vertex[number_of_vertex] or 
> MESH_IDENTIFIER.face[number_of_face] etc. ?
>
> This would make it possible to write macros for placing things evenly 
> distributed on a mesh, which could also had been created by an macro in 
> first place, without the need of external programs, writing the whole mesh 
> crap to disk or the neccessarity of writing an own mesh parser in SDL.
>
> answers are welcome ;-)
>
> .... dave

Hello Dave,

I'm not aware of anything that gives you direct access to the internal data 
structures from the SDL. However, I've used a couple of ways of achieving 
the sort of thing you describe.

One is to use trace() to fire a random series of rays at an object to detect 
points and normals (for growing hairs out of).

The other has been to generate points into an array and then generate a mesh 
from that. Then you can use the same array for other tasks, such as 
distributing things evenly on the surface of the mesh.

Regards,
Chris B.

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