In article <pdb_NOSPAM-372277.16361109052004@news.povray.org>,
 Paul Bourke <pdb### [at] swineduau> wrote:

> Time to blow the dust from those old pixels and wake up some of those
> idle electrons....the next POVRay competition is now open, see
>    http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/povss/

What's a supershape? The first thing I thought of was the superellipsoid 
primitive, but that's the only supershape supported directly by POV. 
There's also macros for a supertorus and what's called a supercone, 
though I think it actually belongs to a different class of objects. The 
pictures on that page seem to be of objects created with various polar 
or spherical equations. Is this just a competition with shapes based on 
spheres and circles? Is there a particular equation to use? How should 
these shapes be generated? I wouldn't restrict it to the parametric 
primitive...meshes? Isosurfaces? Arrangements of other primitives in 
these shapes?

This sounds like something I read a while ago about some guy who had 
patented a "superequation" that could produce a wide variety of shapes. 
It was really trivial, hugely overblown (described as some tremendous 
breakthrough, despite the fact that similar equations have been used for 
centuries), and tremendously stupid that the guy got a patent on it. 
(Why didn't he patent the sine wave while he was at it?)
This MathWorld article has some information on this shape:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Superellipse.html
Looks like this is the same guy, Johan Gielis...and the prize is his 
book. Why give this nut any more support?

-- 
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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