Thanks for the comments so far.

After a quick look around I found this site that talks about the CAT() 
macro. This seems to do something similar in that is scans a "CSG" 
object. See the following for more details:
http://www.persistencia.org/CATHELP/CAT.html

I also found the following previous thread discussing this subject:
http://news.povray.org/povray.newusers/thread/%3Cweb.4acb6d8f90192b14fedfeaac0@news.povray.org%3E/

Are there any other macros/utilities/converters that I should be aware of?

Thanks in advance

Reuben


Warp wrote:
> Alain <aze### [at] qwertyorg> wrote:
>> You are not the first one to think of that.
>> There are macros that can convert most objects into a mesh equivalent.
>> The most notable is one to convert an isosurface into a mesh.
> 
>   AFAIK the best algorithm to convert an isosurface into a mesh is the
> so-called marching triangles algorithm (it's better than other tesselation
> algorithms because it is able to create more and smaller triangles in high
> curvature places and less and larger triangles in low-curvature places, and
> avoids extremely thin triangles; I think it also handles sharp edges much
> better than other algorithms, although I'm not completely sure of this).
> The same algorithm could probably be used with more or less success with
> CSG objects as well (although they have some pitfalls that isosurfaces
> don't have, as CSG objects need to be traced, which introduces its own
> problems, while isosurfaces just need to be evaluated).
> 
>   However, I have never heard of anyone actually going through the trouble
> of implementing the marching triangles algorithm for POV-Ray. So no such
> luck there.
>

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