Easier question:

I have a black and white image, say for instance, a white circle on a black
background.  Is there a simple way to create an object by extruding the
white circle (lying in, say, the xy plane) some distance along the z-axis?
This would, of course, create a cylinder along the z-axis.  In other words,
how can I extrude portions of a b&w imagemap?

Harder question:

Say I change my 2-bit imagemap into a 16-bit grayscale imagemap.  Can I now
extrude my image in the z-direction... only associate a transparency with
each pixel value?  Black might be completely transparent, while white would
be totally opaque, etc.

Something tells me this should be simple, what with all the nifty patterns
and functions... but my little mind can't seem to get it to work right.
Heightfields don't quite do it for me (at least in the second case) since I
need the entire image to be extruded to the same height, varying only
transparency.  Stacking a myriad of images on top of each other started out
as a Good Idea (tm), until I ran into problems with max_trace_level (which
should have been obvious at the start).

Any ideas?

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