In article <40a25ac3$1@news.povray.org>,
 Florian Brucker <tor### [at] torfboldcom> wrote:

> Are the different approaches of the two spline systems (finding 
> intersections vs. finding vectors) really that much different that it is 
> not possible (or not desirable) to create a global spline system which 
> does both jobs?

The two applications are extremely different. Lathes and sors use the 
spline data to generate polynomial objects for each segment, 
intersection is tested against these polynomials. Splines just use the 
time value and interpolate the data to find a point. The data structures 
and algorithms used are quite different.
It would most likely be possible to generate lathes, sors, etc from the 
spline data, but doing so would take a fair amount of work. Using the 
splines to generate meshes would be quite easy, though.

-- 
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