On 11/20/2012 4:41 AM, scott wrote:
>> 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.
>
Well, apparently, at least some bugs in CarveCSG have been corrected. I 
hadn't looked for an update for a while. Also.. in the case of the 
program I used it in, its not "imbedded", but actually drops the mesh 
out to a command line, then imports the result of the merge/cuts/etc. 
Which means, basically, that there may be things it can do, and tricks 
that are just not possible via the method being used to access it.

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