In article <41ba0d45@news.povray.org>,
 Samuel Hoffstaetter <sho### [at] gmailcom> wrote:

> is there any simple way to let povray calculate the surface area and volume
> of an object?
> For example, for a buoy, whose mass depends on it's surface area, it's
> displacement beneath the water surface could be calculated very easily if
> there were functions to calculate the volume & surface area of the buoy in
> povray.
> of course I could calculate this manually also, but it would be a lot easier
> if povray could do this.

There is no easy, general method for doing so, and for some objects 
there are multiple ways to define "surface area". For example, do you 
count both sides of a triangle? Do you count the inner surface of an 
open-ended cylinder? And how do you compute the area of a julia fractal? 
Volume also has some problems...not all shapes have a finite volume, and 
how do you define it for open objects?

However, given some knowledge about the object, you can use the 
scripting capabilities of the POV-Ray scene description language to get 
a numeric approximation. It should be pretty easy to compute both 
surface area and volume for a more or less cylindrical shape with a few 
loops and trace() calls, for example.

-- 
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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