Hi Warp,

You're right of course.  The fundamental differences between raytraced
scenes and mesh based models are such that any conversion is in the end an
approximation.  There are even cases where the semantics of one domain are
nonsensical in another.  For example, what do you do with the camera in a
mesh based model?  Ignore it?

Nevertheless, an 'approximation' of a pov based scene as a mesh is very
useful.  The pov sdl is a concise and effective high-level way to describe
geometry.  In fact, the initial purpose of the program was to enable another
program to generate complex geometries (buildings, urban scenes) in a
straightforward way and produce meshes in the end.

As far as the use of copyrighted code from pov goes, the parser I've written
has no connection to pov code whatsoever.  This shows, as the current parser
certainly has its limitations.  However, I'm writing a new parser from the
BNF spec that will hopefully be far more faithful to pov's sdl.  I have not
and will not use any code from pov's code base.

As far as evaluation of textures goes, it will be quite some time (if ever)
before I get to that.  Infinite surfaces are clipped at the edges of a
bounding 'universe' box.  To completely support pov sdl IS a huge job.  For
now, I'm attempting only part of it.

Paul Senzee

"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:43ce17b6@news.povray.org...
> Paul Senzee <pse### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> > Fully supporting the pov sdl will be a fair amount of (tedious) work,
but
> > certainly doable.
>
>   Can you be a bit more specific on how will you be achieving this feat
> without using copyrighted code from POV-Ray (breaking its usage license)?
> As I noted in my previous post to this thread, simply *parsing* the input
> file is not enough; in order to have full support for POV-Ray scenes you
> have to implement quite a lot of the raytracing functionalities, such as
> tracing objects, calculating their inside and supporting the evaluation
> of textures.
>   While it certainly is possible to do all this with original genuine
code,
> it will be a HUGE job...
>
>   Another thing to address is how you will be tesselating infinite
> non-planar surfaces.
>
> -- 
>                                                           - Warp

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