Wasn't it Stephen who wrote:
>H. Karsten wrote:
>> Well this would be maybe an option for the version 4.
>>
>LOL but seriously why do you want to scale things to zero? If I want to 
>show something getting larger from nothing I initially translate it out 
>of view then using a “step jump” translate it into view and scale 
>it up from a small value.

If we're talking about zero in all three dimensions, then it would be 
efficient to put all the objects inside if statements, and skip the 
parsing and rendering if the scale is zero. Perhaps using a macro that 
accepts an object and a scale factor if there are many such objects to 
be handled.

However, the warning and the defaulting to 1.0 happen if only one of the 
dimensions is scaled to zero. Perhaps Holger wants the objects to be 
scaled infinitely thin, like part of a plane. With the current 
behaviour, if you try to scale an object infinitely thin in one 
direction, the parser thinks you've missed that parameter and scales it 
to 1.0.

I can imagine some of the ray intersection solvers having big problems 
with objects that really do have zero thickness, because they're trying 
to find points where the ray goes from outside to inside something, and 
that doesn't really happen if the object has no thickness. [Note that 
thin objects like planes don't have that problem because they consider 
half the universe to be inside.]

I can also imagine compound objects, like unions, suffering from 
coincident surface artefacts wherever two components with different 
textures overlap.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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