> Depends on exactly which way it isn't perfectly cylindrical in.

How about simply a stretched cylinder, ie an extruded ellipse.  You can't 
simply scale the torus or cone otherwise the radius/bevel will not be 
constant around the perimeter.

As well as having elliptical buttons, the top surface of the buttons on my 
phone are also curved (concave inwards).  I suppose you could model this in 
POV by subtracting a big sphere from the extruded oval.  But how to do the 
rounded edge then?  Matching up a round with the vertical sides (actually 
they're slightly off-vertical) of the button with the curved top surface 
doesn't sound very easy to me.

> Really, you can go a seriously long way using only quadratics and CSG.

Do you have any examples?

> Think about it - if you wanted to model the Natural History Museum, would 
> you built it out of a few quadrillion triangles? Or just cut a few solids 
> out of each other? I know what I'd choose...

And I know which one would look like a photo-realistic model and which one 
would look like a few solids cut out of each other :-)

> Mmm, interesting. In all the years I've been using POV-Ray, I've never 
> actually noticed that before...

I didn't realise it either until I got into designing stuff that people will 
actually see (as opposed to internal components).  Most companies will 
reject any curvature discontinuities.

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