I'm working on my first 'real' POV-Ray project, a complicated (IMO) model 
of NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This has made me wonder how people usually 
create really complicated stuff in POV. I'm a programmer myself but 
*lots* of people using POV are not. The point is that while making this 
model I have found it almost impossible to construct certain parts of it 
without using lots of small 'command line' utilities I wrote in C++ to do 
some geometric calculations, for instance:

(1) Given two circles, find the four lines that are tangential two both 
circles and the points where they 'touch' the circles.

(2) Given two lines through three points (you can think of this as two 
out of three sides on a triangle), determine the center and radius of a 
circle which 'touches' one of the lines at a point with a known distance 
from the point common to the two lines.

And so on, I have written about 5-7 such utilities in recent weeks. I 
use the results from them primarily in POV's union and difference 
statements. Non-programmers can't create utilities like this (and 
calculating something like this on e.g. a pocket calculator is extremely 
tedious) so I'm wondering if I'm missing something, are utilities like 
this available somewhere (if that is the case then *that's* what I've 
missed ;-), are you using such utilities or is what I'm doing unusual in 
some way (I don't think so) ?

I'm coding the model 'by hand' in POV (the POV file is now more than 
2000 lines) but I'm using lots of 'blueprints' and information on Cassini 
that I have found at several (mainly NASA/JPL) websites.

Renderings of my Cassini model can be seen at:

http://www.mmedia.is/~bjj/povstuff/cassini

The radar antennae were particularly complicated and required heavy use 
of my utilities.

Bjorn Jonsson
bjj### [at] zzzmmediais - http://www.mmedia.is/~bjj
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