On Tue, 25 Jun 2002 16:51:39 +1000, "Chris Friedl"
<cfr### [at] bigpondnetau> wrote:

>I want to morph some 3D letters (non English Alphabet) into other letters
>and also other solid objects. I can't find references to morphing in the
>Pov-Ray help (3.5 beta 6) althought I've seen references in older Pov-Ray
>news posts. If morphing isn't a built in feature of Pov-Ray, can anyone
>point me in a direction which covers this topic from the Pov-Ray point of
>view. Thanks.

Morphing comprises of three distinctive manipulations - warping,
tweening and cross-dissolving.

Warping involves deforming the shape. Tweening involves interpolating
between the original and deformed shape. Cross-dissolving involves
fading the original color into the new one.

That said, there is no unique way to morph from one object (2D or 3D,
regardless) into another. Even if straight linear interpolation is
used for the tweening, warping involves remapping entities from the
source to the image, and this can be done in a variety of ways. That's
why morphing software features points, lines or splines to define
these entities in their original and final positions. No software can
guess for itself.

I guess you have probably guessed by now that POV cannot do morphing
by default.

ABX recently made experiments with defining two object as an
isosurface and then weight-averaging the two equations with respect to
the clock. However, this is merely cross-dissolving in 3D and is not
morphing. There is zero warping involved.

I am not quite sure true morphing can currently be done in POV-Ray.
Commercial 3D packages that can do it use polygons for defining object
geometry, and warping then in no different than warping an image, only
the equations are 3D. All you have to do is move the vertices of the
polygons one way or another. With POV and its mathematical, entities,
it's much harder, if not impossible (it is possible, but will be
horribly slow due to the nightmarish order of the equations involved)

I hope this answers your question.


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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