"scam" <sca### [at] mailusydeduau> wrote in message 
news:web.457cad8ac5c6b6f49626fb630@news.povray.org...
> Hi all,
>
> I wish to make an animation of light pulses moving around an optical CPU.
> The geometry consists of multiple curved paths, and looks something like
> this (although the final version will be much more complicated):
> http://guidetomp3players.com/images/heightfield2.png
>
> The geometry is based on a 2D image essentially drawn by hand, and the
> constituent curves are not defined mathematically so I can't easily
> parameterize the paths. So what I think I need is a tool where I can trace
> the geometry by hand and get as output paths that I could import into
> POV-Ray for the light pulses to follow. Does anyone know of a tool/utility
> that could do this?
>
> Of course if someone can think of a better way to do it then I'd love to
> hear your thoughts.
>
> Cheers.
>

Hi,

You may care to look at InkScape, which is a free 2D SVG editor which can 
output vector graphics based shapes as POV-Ray prism obect definitions. The 
prism objects contain bezier_splines that you could use in POV-Ray to track 
along the curves. You'd need to extract the splines and wrap it in 
appropriate SDL for declaring the splines. If the shapes get complicated 
you'd probably want to write a script to do that.

Regards,
Chris B.

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