I've got a fairly elaborate problem in my project that I'm working on 
with a couple of co-students at the university. We're digitally 
reconstructing a castle and have a few towers with cone-tipped roofs or 
even onion-shaped (looking much like those arabic and/or indian 
tower-roofs)...

Anyways, I've got a rectangular, tileable slate roof texture, and my 
idea was to create a bunch of single shingles, map them onto prisms or 
triangles/quads, and write a script which'll follow the shape of the 
roofs, place an appropriate amount of shingles based on the 
circumferance, move on to the next row... Until the roof is finished. 
I'd then render a top-view of the result and project that back onto the 
original cone.

This will work fine for those towers that actually have a cone as a 
roof, those that have onions will have a projection problem on places 
where the roof is nearly vertical. I began wondering if it might be 
possible to render a cylindrical view of the towers, but not from the 
inside out, instead, from the outside (a certain distance) towards the 
center. I thus would get a cylindrical texture I can map back onto the 
onion shape with little less stretching issues...

Anyone have a clue about how I might achieve that with POV-Ray (just 
rendering that cylindrical view, everything else I can pretty much 
script myself)? I'm dimly remembering that there was once a patched 
POV-Ray which would allow functions as input for the camera, I'm 
wondering if I'd need that (and if anyone has a suitable function 
already at hand, I'm not that good with those)...

Regards,
Tim

PS: Just re-reading this post for errors and misspelling, I was 
wondering if I could use the basic cylindrical rendering POV-Ray 
provides, but simply switch the roof-tiles to no_image, place a 
reflecting cylinder outside the roof, and thus, render the reflection 
*as if* I was looking from the outside... Hm, worth a shot, at least...

-- 
aka "Tim Nikias"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

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