William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

> I agree, more inbuilt ability to see the value distributions is needed.
> It would, over the years, have saved me huge chunks of time - especially
> where POV-Ray has been wrong! Not yet quite sure how to approach it in a
> practical sense. By adding functions like f_turb() I am making
> accessible what's not been, but that's just a piece of what is needed.

Agreed.   Certainly the mapping of the pigments with the function values helped
me understand that more, as did writing out / copying all of the source code
pigments into SDL (the easy ones  ;) ).

> Aside: I think putting out a bunch of
> canned functions with thresholds all over the place mostly makes things
> more difficult for typical users.

Yes, and I need to work on my idea of casting out a bit and searching for a more
suitable level set value, if the user-defined one is chosen badly.


> > I would very much like a function that "scales space" prior to passing world
> > space cooordinates into functions.
>
> This was an aim of the new to povr pattern_modifiers {} keyword.

Ah, excellent.  :)


> I used to do loops more often; creating spheres and such to represent
> value regions. More though, I'm using functions as pigments - partly
> reasons for raw_wave and function_interval wave modifier keywords in
> povr.

I have started to do that more myself, having recognized the value and ease of
it.  :)

I was starting to do more of that here, but I needed some education and
direction:
http://news.povray.org/povray.advanced-users/thread/%3Cweb.5ec33c80cab151a1fb0b41570%40news.povray.org%3E/


> So, you taken any more runs at the elliptical_torus? I hate the thing
> now! It seems like it should be doable (even not that hard), so I keep
> taking runs at it - and I just cannot get it... :-)

The above thread was part of my effort to get a more solid footing, and I sent
out an email to a math/comp sci professor - which has yet to be acknowledged or
replied to.  I will try spamming a few more ivory tower academics...  ;)

The radius gets elliptified as one increases the eccentricity.   So maybe one
way to approach it is to figure out what terms to add in to negate that
effect...
define the minor radius as an ellipse, and do the adjustments there...

I had an entrepreneurial business project I got roped into, so I've been coding
a bunch of stuff and had an all-nighter or two, so that's eaten up a bunch of
time and energy lately.   As you say - it _looks_ like it should be SO easy....
 so I won't be able to let it go, will I?   ;)  :D

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