Am 21.12.2015 um 18:24 schrieb Sven Littkowski:

> my naive idea for a basic melting was or is, to do this "melting" or
> "fusioning" simply by a number of curved bodies. Such a curve body looks
> similar to a spline or a quarter of a hollow cylinder.

That would be even more of a nightmare to implement; there is no way
you'll be able to automatically compute such insets and cutaways for
each and every possible combination of POV-Ray's primitives.

Of course you are free to prove me wrong, by implementing all the
necessary stuff in SDL macros. But I'm quite sure it simply cannot be done.

As an exercise, I challenge you to solve (that is, give a definition of
the "melting" inset shapes for) the following "simple" cases:

- Two cylinders of different radii R_1 and R_2, intersecting each other
(perpendicular and with intersecting axes, for starters), with a
"melting" inset radius of R_i.

- Three planes intersecting each others (perpendicular, for starters),
with different radii for the "melting" insets between the pairs, R_i_1,
R_i_2 and R_i_3. Of course the corner where the three planes meet is
also expected to be smooth.

This might give you a /basic/ idea of the fundamental challenges involved.


A simple rule of thumb: If you struggle to achieve some geometry using
SDL, expect it to be even more difficult for general cases, and a
nightmare to implement as a native feature in POV-Ray.

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