> There is the open source (I think) CarveCSG, but there are some quirks
> in it, most of them resulting from intersection cases, where the parts
> being "carved" into/by, don't cross an edge. Sometimes it works, other
> times it looks like it works, until you try to do something, like UV
> mapping in an editor, and other times it just fails to work at all.
> Something would need to be done to test for such cases, and then
> adjust/correct for it, obviously.

It may also be worth looking into how 3D CAD software works. They do 
exactly what you want, convert very complex CSG - often hundreds of 
levels deep - into triangle meshes suitable for the graphics card. They 
do this very robustly and have lots of control over the quality of the 
mesh and can automatically calculate mass/inertia etc - it seems 
perfectly suited.

A quick Google reveals that OpenCascade is a free core that does that, 
the only real task would be writing a converter from POV's primitives 
and CSG commands into a format that OpenCascade would understand. It 
would probably easiest be written as a patch to the POV binary that 
could then make use POV's internal data structures after the scene has 
been parsed.

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