"jceddy" <jce### [at] gmailcom> wrote:

> 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,

To quote my research advisor, editing my thesis, "Which is...?"   ;)

> 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.

Indeed.  I haven't looked too much at the parser and the tokenizing of things,
but I would imagine that every object defined in SDL would have to have some
unique identifier of one sort or another.  It would be great to discover what
that is, and have an SDL-accessible table of numbered objects and associated
attributes.

I really have no top-down overview of how everything happens in order to go from
the simplest of scenes to defining the final rgb values of a pixel in a render.
It would be great to make a flowchart, perhaps with one of those automated
software-analyzing packages...

I guess just start by looking at:
povray/source/core/shape/mesh.cpp

and see if anything pops out at you.

> 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.

There are a few of us who have compilers, being on linux machines, but I usually
need a bit of hand-holding to build pov-ray from scratch and install it.  ;)

I think it also comes down to a sort of chicken-and-egg thing, where people have
reason to use their compiler, so they don't know how, and so they don't do
anything with them.

I can kinda read _most_ of the source code, but there are certain notations and
other things going on that I'm still ignorant of, and therefore remain cryptic.
I've dabbled, and spent quite a while programming several arduino boards for
various different purposes.   Which is "C++".

Post a reply to this message