Bob Hughes wrote:

> "Tor Olav Kristensen" <tto### [at] onlineno> wrote in message
> news:39577684.362EF60F@online.no...
> |
> | Jerome wrote:
> |
> | >         trace()?
> |
> | No ... ehh .... what is trace() ?
> | Is it a function in one of the new patches ?
> |
> | I'm only using plain POV v3.1.
> |
> | A macro I made calculates where the surface of a blob is.
> | (The red one in this image.) I used information from this macro
> | to place the spheres in second blob (the white one).
> |
> | The removing of the "ice" in some areas is done by inserting some
> | spheres with negative strength randomly around on the surface.
>
> Figured there had to be negative strength blob at work here.  It's great,
> except your macro might very well become extinct because of 'trace()',
> although only in that the check for blob surface would no longer be
> manually(?) done.

I just downloaded the html documentation for MegaPov and as far as
I can see it would be difficult to use trace() to locate "every" part of the
surface of an object if it's surface is not convex.

(Othervise one would then have to test for surfaces behind surfaces.
And one would have to move around and "radiate" vectors from several
points in space to be sure that surfaces that otherwise would be
perpendicular to the ray centre, get enough vector "hits".
Hmmm... maybe this could be an interesting macro to make !)

So I think my "manual" macro has an advantage here :-)
It can can "map" any blob surface topology.
But its parsing very slowly. Maybe I'll combine trace() with my macro later.

Thank you for commenting.


Tor Olav
--
mailto:tor### [at] hotmailcom
http://www.crosswinds.net/~tok/tokrays.html

Post a reply to this message