"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> "Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>
> > And a favorite technique of my own is to turn an object (even a mesh) into an
> > object pattern, then into a function, and to use that to create an isosurface
> > (although this has some limitations)-- but which can then be altered with
> > interesting distortions like warp{turbulence...}, fnoise_3D, etc.
>
> touch base with Bill Pragnell about how best to use functions to distort your
> meshes directly.

Yes, meshes could be distorted in other ways than by my object-pattern idea; but
I mostly use CSG models with the process. It just happens that meshes work with
it too.

The downside of the process is a lighting problem: The resulting isosurface does
NOT respond to lighting well, and looks very odd-- the surface normals are
*quite* strange, to say the least, probably because the object pattern was never
made to be used this way.  So I texture the final iso using an ambient 1
finish...which sounds very limiting... but I also use Rune's old ILLUSION.INC to
apply the texture (like 'texture baking' in this case), which solves the
lighting problem quite nicely. I've been meaning to post about this scheme for
quite awhile, as the results are rather extraordinary, IMHO. I hope to get
around to it soon...

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