"Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> The artifacts I see make me think of thin sections combined into full letters.
> All guesswork, of course ;-)

Howdy Kenneth,

You guessed very well! You are correct that the characters are made of thin
slices. I'm not nearly as adept at mathematics as I would like to be and am
therefore limited to the less elegant and sophisticated methods. The moire
patterns are caused by the union of the differing-width slices. One fine detail,
however, is that the slices are not scaled in the x dimension, but rather each
slice is intersected from a character that is created at the correct size for
that particular deformation function value. If the slices were simply scaled,
the inner parts would not match up. This is also what allows for the vertical
deformation.

The next font variation in the set (#38) applies the same technique to the z
dimension as well. The effect is stunning in my opinion but requires radiosity
to really see what's going on. A character would be sliced up into (number of
vertical slices) * (number of depth slices) blocks which results in very slow
rendering times. An animation should be very cool indeed but due to the render
time required I haven't done it. Maybe a single word ("POV" would do) could be
animated at relatively low resolution in a couple weeks.

Here are the demo images of the font variations in case you want to see what #38
looks like:
https://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/thread/%3Cweb.59f0b9385b47c265c581d2c50%40news.povray.org%3E/?ttop=43635
9&toff=500

I've added a few more characters (@, cross, arrows) since the last "Border
Characters" posting so if anyone's interested I'll post an update.

Have a wonderful day!

Kind regards,
Dave Blandston

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