Ken wrote:
> 
> Mike wrote:
> >
> > How about phongless? :)
> >
> > -mike
> 
> What if it has metallic or specular highlighting ?
> 
> Would this keyword also affect the way reflection is calculated ?
> 
> --
> Ken Tyler
> 
> mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

How about
light_source{
	location vector
	colour
	...
	diffuse value
	phong value
	specular value }

Makes it easy to tell what each value affects.

Cheers, PoD.

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> Well it was made as a serious comment that I believe is echoed by many but
> if it helps you achieve this in your work as a side effect then I am for
> that too.

    No slur on your comment was intended and I regret that it may have
seemed that way.

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Bill DeWitt wrote:
 
> > but if it helps you achieve this in your work as a side effect then
> > I am for that too.
    ^ ^   ^   ^    ^
>     No slur on your comment was intended and I regret that it may have
> seemed that way.

  No slur taken nor admonishment intended sir.

  I would like to stress though to anyone who will listen I feel strongly
that the sampling method currently used for the media feature is inadequate
for the process. It is not living up to it's expectations and a major feature
in the program is currently crippled as a result.
  Some of these other suggestions are nice luxury items but this is a feature
attraction that is is not working right or as well as it might. In my opinion
other newer additions can wait for important corrections or improvements. If
the choice comes down to time available only to work on one or the other I
personaly choose improving what we have over adding more onto a crippled
system

Proverb time:

... or as grampa used to say why buy a bucket to catch the water from
the leaky faucet when you can pay to fix the leak instead... or why paint
the car when the engine wont run... or...

-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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With the method I described both could be handled in the same manner.  I
think it would also be easier to type.

translucence {
color <1, 1, 1>
}

or

translucence {
color_map {
[0 color rgb <1, 1, 1>]
[1 color rgb <1, 0, 0>]
}
}

or
translucence {
image_map {
tga "leaf.tga"
}
}

The default would be black, which would be double-illuminate off, and
anything other than that would turn it on.  Clearly it would require a new
entity in texture, which some folks might not like, but I don't see how it
could be handled better, unless it was given an entry in finish like irid.

The image_map example also alludes to an important point.  If UV mapping is
going to be in the next release of POV-Ray, it really should have texture
coordinates specified for image_maps, bump_maps, or any other maps within
those statements, and not part of an object's geometry.  Texture
coordinates should be relative to the uv coordinates of a surface, not
redefine them, otherwise all maps can only be applied in one way.

-Mike

Chris Huff wrote:

> Well translucency is a great idea(one I had thought of and forgot), but
> I still think having control of double-illumination would be good. Both
> of them, not either-or.

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What I had in mind was more along the lines of having the translucency
{...} stuff be in the interior {...} portion, and have a
double_illuminate keyword in the finish {...} statement.
Double-illuminate would affect the surface of the object (both inside
and outside would be illuminated), and translucence would depend on
thickness, and affect light passing through(photon-mapping + blurred
reflections + translucence = WOW!). I know that translucence can be done
with media, but this is hard to control and slow. A special keyword with
a sampling method designed for doing translucence would be much better.

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I'm hesitant to mention this because, for all I know, it's in there
somewhere and I haven't found it yet:

texture coordinates for triangle meshes.

VRML has got this, and it's marvelous.  Quite often I'll sketch in
VRML to get the basic geometry and camera and lighting and then
export to POVRay, and it's kind of weird to lose capabilities
when I go up to POVRay.
+-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen        |            "IT FOUND ME!"            |
| cri### [at] hiwaaynet            |      Campus Crusade for Cthulhu      |
+-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+

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Have you looked at the tri-color macro for triangles yet? You may have and
I'm leading you to old stuff. Anyway, it's at:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/otherincludes.html

No idea if this is the same kind of thing you are looking for or not, but
it does apply a pigment to points on the triangles.


Bob Crispen wrote:
> 
> I'm hesitant to mention this because, for all I know, it's in there
> somewhere and I haven't found it yet:
> 
> texture coordinates for triangle meshes.
> 
> VRML has got this, and it's marvelous.  Quite often I'll sketch in
> VRML to get the basic geometry and camera and lighting and then
> export to POVRay, and it's kind of weird to lose capabilities
> when I go up to POVRay.
> +-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
> | Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen        |            "IT FOUND ME!"            |
> | cri### [at] hiwaaynet            |      Campus Crusade for Cthulhu      |
> +-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+

-- 
 omniVERSE: beyond the universe
  http://members.aol.com/inversez/homepage.htm
 mailto://inversez@aol.com?Subject=PoV-News

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Bob Hughes wrote:

> Have you looked at the tri-color macro for triangles yet? You may have and
> I'm leading you to old stuff. Anyway, it's at:
> 
> http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/otherincludes.html
> 
> No idea if this is the same kind of thing you are looking for or not, but
> it does apply a pigment to points on the triangles.

Many thanks, Bob.  That's a feature request I didn't mention, but
which has a very high coolness-per-byte payoff: per-vertex coloring.
I'm off to try it now.

What I had in mind was mapping 2D coordinates of a texture image to
points on a mesh.  The way it's done in VRML is explained at
http://home.hiwaay.net/~crispen/vrmlworks/tutorials/texture.html
There's a fairly spectacular example of texture coordinates at
http://home.hiwaay.net/~crispen/worlds/avatar/bobhead.wrl -- a
friend of mine did this for me last summer at SIGGRAPH.  It's three
photos overlaid on three laser rangefinder scans of my head.

They messed up on my nose -- it doesn't point west quite so much
as it does in one of those meshes, but thanks to texture coordinates,
when I move the points of my nose over, the texture will move with
the points.

Granted that file formats where meshes are central and you have
point sets and indices (Inventor, VRML, lots of others) make the
texture coordinate mapping pretty compact, but compactness doesn't
matter so much in POV.  There's no reason why it couldn't be
applied to the POV notation just like Chris's tri-colour macro.
Instead of rgb value, just specify the texture image for the
triangle and the coordinates within the image for each point.
+-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen        |            "IT FOUND ME!"            |
| cri### [at] hiwaaynet            |      Campus Crusade for Cthulhu      |
+-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+

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That head mesh is great. Only other one I've seen was on TV. I'd wager it
was the crowd at SIGGRAPH that caused the nose to be off center. Somebody
probably nudged the tripod (if the laser range finders were tripod
mounted). heh-heh
From what I could make out of that tri-color macro I thought perhaps a
whole texture (including image_map?) might be done the same way. I'm not
much a user of meshes though.
In case you hadn't heard or seen it, there's a thing called Photo Modellor
that applies images to meshes you create by plotting out the points onto
several views of the pictured object (front, side, top, etc.). Only tough
part is the manual mesh making and I didn't have any success learning to
get the surfaces defined enough. Seems potentially a great thing, free
trial version available. Mike Hough told several of us about it at AOL,
it's at:

 http://www.eossystems.com/Lite/


Bob Crispen wrote:
> 
> Bob Hughes wrote:
> 
> > Have you looked at the tri-color macro for triangles yet? You may have and
> > I'm leading you to old stuff. Anyway, it's at:
> >
> > http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/otherincludes.html
> >
> > No idea if this is the same kind of thing you are looking for or not, but
> > it does apply a pigment to points on the triangles.
> 
> Many thanks, Bob.  That's a feature request I didn't mention, but
> which has a very high coolness-per-byte payoff: per-vertex coloring.
> I'm off to try it now.
> 
> What I had in mind was mapping 2D coordinates of a texture image to
> points on a mesh.  The way it's done in VRML is explained at
> http://home.hiwaay.net/~crispen/vrmlworks/tutorials/texture.html
> There's a fairly spectacular example of texture coordinates at
> http://home.hiwaay.net/~crispen/worlds/avatar/bobhead.wrl -- a
> friend of mine did this for me last summer at SIGGRAPH.  It's three
> photos overlaid on three laser rangefinder scans of my head.
> 
> They messed up on my nose -- it doesn't point west quite so much
> as it does in one of those meshes, but thanks to texture coordinates,
> when I move the points of my nose over, the texture will move with
> the points.
> 
> Granted that file formats where meshes are central and you have
> point sets and indices (Inventor, VRML, lots of others) make the
> texture coordinate mapping pretty compact, but compactness doesn't
> matter so much in POV.  There's no reason why it couldn't be
> applied to the POV notation just like Chris's tri-colour macro.
> Instead of rgb value, just specify the texture image for the
> triangle and the coordinates within the image for each point.
> +-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
> | Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen        |            "IT FOUND ME!"            |
> | cri### [at] hiwaaynet            |      Campus Crusade for Cthulhu      |
> +-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+

-- 
 omniVERSE: beyond the universe
  http://members.aol.com/inversez/homepage.htm
 mailto://inversez@aol.com?Subject=PoV-News

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I just want a function to tell me the height at a particular coordinate of a
heightfield.  That way I can programatically place objects at the surface of
the heightfield instead of having to place objects by hand with
trial-and-error or externally with a program.

Imagine if you will... Romans charging across a "Khaki" rippling HF plain in
close regular but randomized formation.  Or barbarian blue-skinned celts,
wild-eyed and naked skewered on roman philum.

Seriously, a cohort of soldiers flowing across the crest of a heightfield
would be much more impressive and interesting to look at than ranks of them
lined up on level "boxes".

Towns and villages could be contoured to the terrain giving much more
realistic "spaces".

Owwww heck... just getting the trees to set right on the landscape would be
nice.

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