In article <3d340ef3$1@news.povray.org>,
 "TinCanMan" <Tin### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:

> I don't think that simple primitives have the solution.  There must be some
> way of creating quadratic type surfaces without having a discrete mesh.
> Perhaps isosurfaces could be accomodated, but I would think that would come
> at great CPU expense.

Why try so hard to avoid using a triangle mesh? Any method you find will 
probably be much more CPU hungry and have artifacts that are harder to 
get rid of than faceting. The reason originally given for "curved smooth 
triangles" was the dark artifact seen when the normal points away from 
the camera, but there are other possible ways to fix that with flat 
smooth triangles.
It seems like the best solution for curved triangles would be a cubic 
surface tesselated into triangles, something like a triangular bezier 
patch. It could even be tesselated on the fly to reduce memory 
requirements.

Maybe subdivision surfaces would be a better solution.

-- 
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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