In article <3ee397c2$1@news.povray.org>,
 Lutz-Peter Hooge <lpv### [at] gmxde> wrote:

> I uploaded a table with my tests:
> <http://www.lutz-peter.hoogi.de/extern/hfield/>

I notice you didn't use smoothing on the height field...why?


> So a POV-generated TGA (or 2 seperate images) seems to be the only way
> to get it working.

Since the .hf feature is independant of the file format, you could use 
it with other 8-bit color formats as well, you just need a way to 
generate them. You could generate a RG-encoded-gray TGA and convert it 
to PNG to save space, for example.


> However it would be much nicer if POV directly supported 16bit PNG
> (or TIFF)...

In addition, the whole arrangement of having TGA handled specially in 
height fields seems unsatisfactory. For one thing, there are 24 bits 
available in most RGB images, but 8 are wasted. Height fields internally 
store values as short ints, but there are other uses now such as 
isosurfaces, so might as well put that third byte to use.
The hf_gray_16 option generally looks badly designed, it seems really 
out of place in global_settings when other file output options are part 
of the command line or .ini file. I would have done it as a file output 
option useable with any format, and a special toggle to make the height 
field load an RG/RGB-encoded-grayscale instead of an ordinary RGB file.

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

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