In article <3EA### [at] matumde>, Achill <ach### [at] matumde> 
wrote:

> I do not know of a concrete "practical usage" either. My main idea was 
> to visualize the mathematical defintion of the vector sum (also known as 
> Minkowski sum, see http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MinkowskiSum.html) of 
> two arbitrary sets.
> 
> Besides I think this would give some nice effects. For example a general 
> "rounding" by adding a sphere.

I think you need to learn more about how raytracing works. POV can not 
take the "vector sum of all points on an object", because it doesn't 
know all points on the object. Raytracing works by finding the 
intersection point of rays with surfaces, the various shape types use a 
wide variety of methods to do this, ranging from simple geometric 
formulas to complex root-finding algorithms. You can't just add these 
intersection finding algorithms together to get a new one.

Your idea seems to depend on having two sets of points and resulting in 
a third set, POV does not have the first two sets and wouldn't be able 
to do anything with the third (though there is a method for raytracing 
point fields that might be useful with this, it is not currently 
implemented in POV).

Yes, a general rounding algorithm would be nice sometimes, but it is not 
possible without completely changing the way POV handles shapes. If it 
is ever added to POV, it will probably be a mesh processing feature.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

Post a reply to this message