> O> As each ray chugs through design space it will need to know its
> distance from
>> each of these planes and on which side it is. Associated with each
>> plane is a
>> "field" which has the value of 1 at distances greater than the corner
>> radius
>> from the inside and -1 at distances greater than the same distance
>> outside.
>> Between these two the strength of the field follows a sine curve,
>> going through
>> zero at the plane itself. The field values of all the elements are
>> summed. (The
>> calculation might be faster with cubic; the corners would not be exactly
>> circular, but would anyone notice or care?)
>>
>> A simple tetrahedral rounded object can be created with four plane
>> elements. The
>> ray decides it has encountered a surface when the sum of the field
>> values is
>> greater than the surface count number, which, in this case is 3. In
>> general, for
>> convex polyhedra, it would be one less than the number of plane elements.
>
> Could you use an isosurface to test out this idea?
>

You may do a blobbing of the intersection of four planes to get a 
rounded tetrahedron, of six planes for a rounded box,...
Possible, done before and relatively slow.

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