Thank you all for your replies - it's helped me a great deal.

Bill: I'd like to see that macro whenever you've got it to a state you're 
happy with - I'm curious how you've done the optimisations.

I need to learn about isosurfaces. I've done degree level engineering so 
have a firm math foundation but never really touched onthem beyond "this is 
the eqn for a sphere"... so if anyone could point me in the right direction 
for some reading material, I'd be greateful!

Again, thank you all

-Simon
"Simon" <povray@*NOSPAM*SOWare.co.uk> wrote in message 
news:46739cc9$1@news.povray.org...
> I'm sorry to ask this but I suspect this is one of my big problems with 
> making scenes look realistic...
>
> When I define an object (let's use a round stand), I would do something 
> like:
>
> A vertical cylinder to represent the top of the stand
> a torus to round the edges of the stand
> a vertical cylinder to represent the side of the stend.
>
> I'm doing all this to give the shape soft/rounded edges
>
> (hope this makes sense) but although I can do it in simple cases, to do it 
> for (say) a box would require 3 boxes, 12 cylinders and 8 spheres.
>
> Is this the only way? Is this how it was done for individual blocks in the 
> P.b-i "Yet Another CGSphere Entry" post ? or is there some way to "erode" 
> ?
>
> Any help greatly appreciated
>
> Thanks in advance
> S
>

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