POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.general : Minimum Distance Function : Re: Minimum Distance Function Server Time
28 Mar 2024 19:42:57 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Minimum Distance Function  
From: jceddy
Date: 7 Jul 2022 20:35:00
Message: <web.62c77b946fb4e448864166f75d51d79c@news.povray.org>
> So, I'm thinking that for your mesh, you would have a set of vertices - so why
> not treat those as a point cloud?
>
> Then you could have a tool to just find the minimum Euclidian distance between
> the camera and all of the points in the cloud.  I ... feel ... there's some way
> to optimize that so you don't have to check every single point. (?)
>

In my case I already have a mesh. I'm the case of a simple mesh object there is
a straightforward way of computing minimum distance, but it would be slow unless
you do some fancy preprocessing to partition the vertices/faces.

Either way, in the case of an arbitrary object defined in SDL, I have not
figured out if there is a way in C++ to be able to go "hey, this is a mesh!" and
then get access to the underlying data.



>
> Finally, It would be great if you could provide a few posts detailing your
> thought processes and some of the pertinent details about how to go about
> writing on'es own function and getting POV-Ray to recognize and use it as a
> built-in function.  That would greatly help anyone who has enough programming
> experience to do so, but doesn't have the time to invest in tracking down all of
> the details on the learning curve of doing that for POV-Ray - it's not like any
> of that is really documented anywhere, and Dr. Orf's explanation, although good,
> seemed like it was brief and geared to people who might already know how to do
> so.
>

Yeah, a "developer's guide to patching povray" would be great. 😁

I could possible post some details about how to add keywords and get them
processed, but it would only really be useful to folks that have a compiler and
know how to use it.


Post a reply to this message

Copyright 2003-2023 Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty. Ltd.