Dear waggy, Christian, and Stephen,

Thank you all for the input.

I'm still going through some of the quick codes you've written for me, and still
learning. However, some quick thoughts:

"waggy" <hon### [at] handbasketorg> wrote:

> Although this is true for an arbitrary mesh, when rendering a function...

Although I understand the advantages of functions vs. mesh data, I want to keep
the conversation focused on mesh definitions; it's the more general scenario,
and I want to see that POV-Ray can do in this respect.

I want to also raise the point that Christian made about the difficulty (he
didn't quite say 'difficult') with coloring the meshes.

My main concern with beginning to learn POV-Ray was due to Ankur Pawar, who has
a wonderful gallery on flicker:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerofankur/

You can also see that he has some beautiful surfaces rendered in Sunflow:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerofankur/5771193670/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerofankur/5210558726/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerofankur/4792169852/

From what I gather, these were all generated from mesh data and not function
descriptions. Notice also that the color of the meshes were generated in Matlab
for some of these (I will have to ask him how he did that!)

From my correspondence with Ankur, he mentioned that he preferred Sunflow, as he
found it much easier to generate these sorts of results, in contrast with
POV-Ray.

Of course, I'm left to wonder whether POV-Ray is -just as good- and can generate
the same sort of results with a modest degree of effort.

Comments? Hopefully, I will e-mail this thread to Ankur, and perhaps he will
join us in the discussion as well.

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