in news:cja### [at] netplexaussieorg Christopher
James Huff wrote: 

> Displacement mapping: this has been discussed a *lot* on these
> groups. It would require automatic tessellation of all objects, and
> is generally a huge amount of work before you even get to the
> displacement features. [...]

Yes, it has been discussed many times and the answer you give has also 
been given many times. But I completely disagree.

You don't need automatic tesselation of all objects. Displacement 
mapping and also (sub pixel) surface subdivision, are typical features 
for triangle based objects. So why not implement them just for mesh(2) 
to begin with? Why not stretch POV-Ray's mesh-abilities to the maximum
[1]? Displacement mapping and subdivision are allready mentioned, other
things can be 'bones', reading *.obj files, making mesh
available/accessable as array's, writing modified mesh to file,do the
latter for a tesselate bicubic patch or even a NURBS-object.  I'm sure
there's a lot more that could be done while keeping an eye on the
purely triangle based renderers and modellers. 

Once all that is done, or as a parallel project, one can always look
into tesselation of other objects. 

A side effect of strong mesh-abilities will be that POV-Ray will gain 
more attention from 3D-world outside the POV-Ray community, as they are
almost completely triangle mesh orientated. 


[1] ... and why only mesh-abilities? What about, for example, blobs? 
box-blob, spline-blob, torus-blob(section), blob calculation methods 
...? Let me guess, the awnser will probably be "you can do that with 
isosurfaces". As a user, that is not good enough for me (within
limits). When I start building a blob object and feel the need for a

isosurface.

Ingo

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