Am 06.12.2013 23:16, schrieb David Given:
> On 06/12/13 22:11, David Given wrote:
> [...]
>> One day someone's going to come up with a way of storing efficient,
>> interpolatable spherical heightmap data without the distortion involved
>> in forcing it into a 2D matrix...
>
> The Usenet effect strikes again --- as soon as I post, I stumble across
> the answer!
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrilateralized_spherical_cube
>
> However I doubt Povray's going to get a COBE sky cube spherical
> heightfield primitive any time soon, so it doesn't actually help me much.

The primary problem with a "spherical height field" is that it probably 
doesn't give much advantage over a mesh, as far as rendering time is 
concerned.

That said, I guess a special syntax for "spherical height field" meshes 
would be nice to have (just like mesh2 is also a special syntax for a 
mesh, or like cylinder is actually a syntax for a special case of the 
"cone" primitive); for the tesselation scheme, and possibly also for 
data input, the COBE sky cube might indeed be a good candidate (though 
I'd prefer to use arbitrary patterns for data input, and make the COBE 
sky cube just one more image mapping pattern).

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