Hi Ray Gardener, you recently wrote in povray.general:

> Although they're certainly not as
> simple as raytracers, once one has a
> working triangle rasterizer, the rest
> is straightforward. If one wants a REYES
> algorithm using primitive splitting,
> that's certainly more work, but splits
> are not mandatory. And a triangle rasterizer
> itself is not difficult: it's just a matter
> of bresenham'ing the projected vertices
> into right and left edgelists, and then
> iterating between the edges.
I think it would be a great feature to have in POV-Ray, be it simply
for 3D hardware supported previewing :-) So, I would definitely
support any undertaking you do.

And I know you have a good grip on the depth of the task, but I would
like to reply to the above quoted paragraph that it is not quite that
simple, at least as far as POV-Rays primary modelling paradigm (CSG)
is concerned. It is extremely hard to tesselate (triangulate) an
arbitrary CSG object. I have seen OpenGL code that renders CSGs using
stencil buffers and such, but I'm not sure if that actually works for
complex, nested CSG objects made out of more than just a couple of
boxes and speheres.
I evaluated a lot of the same things when thinking about how to
display a scene in Moray....

- Lutz
  email : lut### [at] stmuccom
  Web   : http://www.stmuc.com/moray

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