"lelama" <nomail@nomail> wrote:

> > Yep! Easy, almost trivial, to do with mesh based geometry, but nearly
> > impossible to do with mathematically based geometry.

I'm not quite sure you mean to say exactly that - mathematical geometry
interfaces where the equations for those geometries are equal, or put another
way, one minus the other is zero.

I think the problem that often arises is that a user's perspective of how
POV-Ray generates an image through "the rendering equation" is a lot different
than how someone who programs the algorithms sees it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but POV-Ray does not "know" anything about the overall
scene and the objects that comprise it.
It systematically follows a ray, and uses a lot of data from the parser and
internal functions to evaluate the RGB value of a pixel.   Then it moves to the
next ray / pixel.

I think that someday a visual diagram, or flowchart showing how a few
representative pixels are evaluated would help people understand both the
complexity, and simplicity of the process.  It would give a better sense of the
advantages drawbacks, the capabilities and limitations.

Perhaps easier, might be to just make a special demo edition that writes out to
a text file what's actually going on at each step in the source code for every
100th or 1000th pixel.  I'm sure it would be an eye-opener.  ;)

> Does povray knows for each pixel on the rendered image to which surface it
> corresponds and what is the normal at this point ? I suppose yes. If so, this is
> maybe possible to do something on the rendered image...

I would suggest that if fillets and rounded corners are desired, that a library
of meshes that correspond to the primitives you want to use is created, and then
macros or whatever, are written to do what is claimed is easy to do with meshes.

I thought that maybe someone had investigated doing something like this in the
past - so many very talented people have written so many useful and inspiring
tools and macros and examples of very clever code.

I will have to look when this real life thing yields a few round tuits not
already reserved for other projects.

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