"Rarius" <rar### [at] rariuscouk> wrote:
> All,
>
> I would REALLY like to see the blob feature expanded.  Currently it only
> supports spheres (point sources) and cylinders (line sources) as
> components... Surely it wouldn't be that difficult to add planes to the mix
> and possibly other primitives as well.  Thinking about it, it seems to me
> that isosurfaces would be a natural component of blobs.

I also enjoy modelling with blobs and it would be definitely useful to allow
boxes as blob components as well.  Unfortunately, I don't believe that is
possible.  Blobs, or metaballs, are specialized fast (and old) algorithms for
rendering organic-like surfaces composed of spheres.  The cylinder component in
povray's blob is just a column of spheres or so I heard.

The general-purpose method of generating any surface is isosurfaces.  Tough on
the math, but much more useful than blobs.  I just wish there was some syntatic
sugar to allow for simple geometric CSG in the specification of isofurfaces,
rather than just functions.  Yes, Christoph Hormann actually came up with a
handy and featureful IsoCSG lib:
http://www.imagico.de/pov/ic/index.html

(including more generic blob making)
but I wish it was syntax rather than macro calls....

Post a reply to this message