In article <3fc7a2fe$1@news.povray.org>, "Carl Hoff" <hof### [at] wtnet> 
wrote:

> Anyways... I posted a picture over in the images area.  I 'think'
> I'm going to try and give up on this idea again but we'll see if
> my mind will let it go.  If anyone wants to try and solve this
> particular problem please let me know if you have any success.

Well, one easy way to do what you want is to make several hundred 
ellipsoids spread along the axis of your shape, linearly changing from 
one shape to the next. This takes quite a few spheres to make a smooth 
shape, and has some obvious inefficiencies, but is quite feasible...in 
fact, it was a common way of creating swept shapes before the 
sphere_sweep primitive. You can optimize it further by clipping of the 
inner spheres and heiarchial bounding. (Split the object in half, put 
each half in a nested union. Split each half in half, again putting the 
two halves in unions. Repeat...you end up with a heirarchial structure 
which removes most of the shapes from consideration early on in 
intersection testing.)

-- 
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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