Wasn't it Rafal Maj Raf256 who wrote:
>Is there some ready to use #macro  with will turn my object into mesh?
>
>It would be usefull for example for complicated isosurface, to speedup
>rendering at expense of memory usage (for hi-quality mesh).
>Yes, I know the object will be only approximated by triangles.
>
>Best, if such macro would have options for quality of triangulation and so
>on.

It turns out that in most cases converting a non-parametric isosurface
into a mesh of reasonable quality takes much longer than rendering the
isosurface. That's because the conversion macro has to go hunting for
points on the surface at parse time in the same sort of way that the POV
renderer hunts for them at render time. The macro doesn't have to
evaluate as many points as the renderer does, but it runs in POV SDL
code which is a bit slower than C.

It may be possible to gain a speed advantage if you're using the same
isosurface in each frame of an animation, by saving the mesh to a file
rather than calculating it for each frame.

<http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/isotut/approx.htm>

See this page also for the parametric case, for which a mesh macro
generally does run much faster.

<http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/isotut/param.htm>

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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