>> For realtime previews, I think the best way is having the Object class 
>> (and all the concrete objects that extend it like Sphere) have a 
>> Tesselate method along with Trace_Ray and Point_Inside (well, whatever 
>> they're called; you get the idea).
> 
> Yes that sounds sensible, it's not actually very hard to tesselate the 
> POV primitives, even the isosurface is pretty straightforward when you 
> use a finite volumetric grid.  Of course for infinite objects you would 
> need to bound them, but seeing as in GPU rendering you need to specify a 
> "far" plane anyway, you would just clip your objects to that.
> 
> The materials shouldn't be too hard either, just the effort of porting 
> the pigment/finish code over to pixel shaders.
> 
> Lights and shadows should be easy enough.  Multi-level reflections would 
> be almost impossible, but first-level reflections should be doable for 
> preview quality.

In this case too I'm not interested in the maths needed for tesselating. 
Just to plan the code from the beginning to, for example, allow each 
object to have a tesselator. So that if somebody wants to write a live 
preview patch, he doesn't have to change half of the POV-Ray code :)

Post a reply to this message