Disclaimer: This is not a feature request but a feature idea. What I hope to
accomplish is to spawn thoughs in other people's heads and start discussion
on the subject.

Something I've been thinking of for some time is how extremely powerful it
would be if functions could be used for any float value found inside a
texture statement. I have no idea if this would be possible, so anyone who
might have an idea, please let me know if the idea is completely impossible,
or if it's just your regular very-difficult-thing-requiring-total-rewrite.

Say for example that you have a function called F(x,y,z) and another called
G(x,y,z). All the following examples would then be valid:

pigment {
   bozo
   color_map{
      [0, rgb F(x,y,z)]
      [1, color <1,G(x,y,z),1>]
   }
}

pigment {
   bozo
   color_map {
      [F(x,y,z), color Color1]
      [F(x,y,z), color Color2]
   }
}

normal {wrikles F(x,y,z) turbulence G(x,y,z)}

normal {crackle 0.5 rotate y*360*F(x,y,z)}

finish {ambient F(x,y,z), diffuse 1-F(x,y,z) reflection G(x,y,z)}

finish {phong F(x,y,z) phong_size G(x,y,z)}

I think you get the idea - so what do you think?

Another part of the suggestion is expanding the number of variables that
textures make available to functions. Currently the intersection point is
avaiable as x,y,z.

I suggest the following:
Intersection point as x,y,z or perhaps something like px,py,pz
Normal at intersection point as nx,ny,nz
Vector of incoming ray as vx,vy,vz

And possible other information. I'm not so sure about this part, and
especially not the details, but as I said I just wanted to share the
thoughts. Other suggestions of how to accomplish extreme user-control of
textures would have my interest. I've already heard of shaders using
POV-Man, but I think that an approach more natural to the POV-Ray scripting
language, and which wouldn't require compiling would be better.

Rune
--
3D images and anims, include files, tutorials and more:
Rune's World:    http://rsj.mobilixnet.dk (updated Nov 5)
POV-Ray Users:   http://rsj.mobilixnet.dk/povrayusers/
POV-Ray Webring: http://webring.povray.co.uk

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