On Mon, 4 Mar 2002 14:54:22 +0100, "Wolfgang Thaller"
<wol### [at] gmxnet> wrote:
> I chose not to write VOP as a part of POV-Ray for several reasons, one of
> which I have already explained. Another reason is that it would be much
> harder to maintain the code if it was part of POV-Ray. If someone changed
> part of POV-Rays internal architecture to optimize something, I'd have
> to immediately adapt my program.

Unnecessarily.
Have you studied sources of POV-Ray ?  You probably did. All objects have
unified list of methods. It shoudn't be very difficult to add new method :
triangle representation. Such method can return tesselated geometry for basic
shapes like sphere, box, triangle... or just bounding_box for advanced shapes
like isosurface, parametric, sphere_sweep. Note - you maintain separated code
this way for opengl preview  and object triangulation and it is independent of
other optimizations. This way you don't have to write parser at all - just use
builded one and in apriopriate time just call OpenGL - preview. Perhaps such
preview could be called after parsing but before rendering with additional
question - "do you want real trace ?". It's not new idea - iirc it was
mentioned in p.u.p by Chris Huff year ot two ago.

ABX

Post a reply to this message