In article <3d2c7309@news.povray.org>, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> 
wrote:

>   You mean that, if successful, it will be possible to make objects glow?-)
> (And I mean faster than using media with the proximity pattern.)
>   That would be a pretty cool effect. :)

That is what I'm planning. It will be a "cheat", basically it would be 
to emitting media + proximity what fog is to scattering media, but it 
should be much faster, at least for most simple shapes. There will still 
be "point glows"...probably a glow "object" which doesn't have a surface 
but supports points, rings, lines, etc...


>   By the way, it will probably be worth the effort to optimize the proximity
> calculation for meshes. After all, meshes are so versatile and so common
> (specially when you import objects from other renderers to povray). The faster
> you can make the proximity pattern for a mesh, the better.

That's going to be the generalised glow solving method...the patch will 
tesselate to a low-res mesh for glow calculations when an shape specific 
method doesn't exist. That will be part of the proximity patch as well, 
though I'm not going to completely abandon the ray sampling method.

Basically, I'll need to do:

1: a tesselation method for each object, using marching whatevers as 
default and specialized algorithms for some objects,

2: a distance-from-point method, using #1 + mesh method if a specialized 
method doesn't exist, and

3: a distance-from-line method, again using # 1 + mesh method if a 
specialized method doesn't exist.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom>
POV-Ray TAG e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
TAG web site: http://tag.povray.org/

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