> Yeah. In that case you'd have to use a sphere-sweep [which is inexplicably 
> slow for no defined reason].

And how many points would you put in the spline that your sphere-sweep was 
following?

>> 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.
>
> It does to me, but hey...

Ermmm, ok, here's my button then, show me how to add a round and/or bevel to 
the top (+y) of it:

difference
{
 cone{ <0,0,0> 8 <0,5,0> 7}
 sphere{ <0,50,0> 46 }
 scale <1,1,0.75>
}

> Yes, because crude approximations

Who said anything about crude?  You said a billion triangles, on a 1920x1200 
screen that makes each triangle about 1/500th of a pixel.

> to cylindrical columns look so much more photo-realistic than actually 
> cylindrical columns. Oh, wait...

I've never seen a mathematically perfect cylindrical column IRL before.

> Ah, well, presumably if you're doing CAD rather than just pretty pictures, 
> you have *real* modelling tools. ;-)

True, but even when making pretty pictures (eg for films or posters etc) you 
don't want broken reflections like that - they look ugly.

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