Am 18.07.2016 um 16:20 schrieb Bald Eagle:
> clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> 
>> I can see what you mean by "direct accesss to the seed points for
>> crackle", but what would "'direct access' or access to a copy of" any of
>> the "simple infinite patterns" be in this context?
> 
> brick, cells, checker, gradient, hexagon, spiral, square, triangular, wood
> perhaps any of the tilings or pavements

I can imagine what patterns you have in mind, but I still only have a
vague idea what "direct access" you envision for them.

> any crystal structure - real or theoretical

That's a lot, I guess ;)
Obviously, some of them are /not/ available as POV-Ray patterns, so what
about them?

> I'm just thinking from the perspective of ready-made subdivisions of 3D space,
> especially in the context of individual points.
>
> That would allow the rapid generation of wireframe "boxes" of all sorts of
> shapes, placement of objects and light sources along grid intersections that are
> not necessarily rectangular, they would form the basis of user-defined patterns
> since they would act as a sort of "graph paper", etc.

The problem there is that, except for the crackle pattern, the "nodes"
of the patterns provided by POV-Ray don't exist /a priori/; rather, they
emerge from the way the pattern value is computed from individual
points: Where there's a discontinuity in value of nearby points, there's
a node; where there is only a gradual change, there isn't.

Various of the patterns you mentioned don't even have point-like nodes,
and just have line-like or surface-like discontinuities. The wood
pattern is one such example: It has one central line-like discontinuity,
with concentric cylinder-like discontinuities at regular distances.

And even when patterns do exhibit point-like nodes, any application of
even the slightest turbulence would make it impossible to identify their
effective resulting location: "backtracking" POV-Ray's turbulence warp
is, to my knowledge, not feasible.


> They could also form the basis for mapping or subdividing the surface of an
> object - picture lines or cones or boxes radiating out from the interior of an
> object like a sphere or a box.  The interior point is presumably known /
> selected, and then FROM that point, you have a network of points to "draw out"
> TO.

Now you again have me at the disadvantage of not understanding what you
mean :)

> How will this work?  What will people use it for?
> How the heck do I know?

I guess that's the crux of the matter ;)

> I just know that if someone makes a tool, then the
> creative people here will pick it up and play with it in ways we could never
> predict.   I just think such a set of pattern-point tools would be useful and
> inspiring, and labor-saving.
> 
> They don't necessarily have to be "internal" to POV-Ray - they could be macros
> or formulas, or anything the user has direct access to and possibly control
> over.

That may be a reasonable approach. Aside from the crackle pattern, I
don't think it would be reasonable to even attempt to implement such
stuff in POV-Ray proper.

Which of course puts the responsibility for picking up and implementing
your idea into the hands of the POV-Ray community as a whole, and I
myself can conveniently back out of the topic ;)

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