hi,

"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> ...
> regarding gts, it seems like Melody might like the Puget Sound and Grand Canyon
> models to complement his cool Hawaiian islands animations.   :)
> https://www.cc.gatech.edu/projects/large_models/

nope, I don't see GTS data there.  :-(


> > > Just as an interesting aside:
> > > If anyone understands the file structures well enough, it would be rather
> > > interesting to do the conversion completely in SDL,
> > that does sound, um, a little masochistic.  :-)
>
> I opened STL in text editor, and it's just an issue of syntax.
> SDL well and truly sucks for manipulating text, however I wrote a LibreOffice
> spreadsheet last night in no time that converts STL to POV-Ray mesh {} format.
> Looks like it ought to be just as simple to write something in C, C++, or as a
> shell script.

the STL file format is from 1987, according to Wikipedia, so you'd think that
somebody already wrote such an utility (in those 30-odd years).


> ...
> With regard to the #read directive:
> "Undefined identifiers will be turned into global identifiers of the type
> determined by the data which is read. Previously defined identifiers remain at
> whatever global/local status they had when originally created. Type checking is
> performed to insure that the proper type data is read into these identifiers."
>
> It would be SO NICE to have an end-user function in SDL for type-checking data.

agree, POV-Ray would benefit from having more (any! :-)) "introspection" tools.


> > the user ought to have choice of 'mesh' or 'mesh2', imo.
>
> Agreed, but mesh is trivial - my point was only that mesh2 seems to be so
> challenging that seeing how to go about coding it would be a valuable tutorial.

v little difference for GTS data, may be different for other format(s).


regards, jr.

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