Thanks for the advice, I'm already working on it, but not everything is 
solved...

> should be same in all the triangles. If you want a smooth lighting, it 
> should, but it doesn't have to be (if the normal differs in the 
> adjacent triangles, it will give you an "edge" even though the
> lighting of the triangles is smooth; this is sometimes a desired 
> effect).
sorry but I don't understand... using non-pov programs, like polygonal 
modelers which implement phong shading (amapi, formz and such) if the 
angle between 2 polygons on an edge is inferior to a threshold their 
gradients are matched and one just sees the surface smooth. Can you give 
me an example maybe?

> vectors and divide by the number of triangles).   AFAIK the best 
> result is got if you *don't* normalize the normal vectors after the 
> cross-product, but use them as they are. (The length of the vector
> produced by the cross-product is the area of the triangle and this 
> gives it a good weight in the average.)
I did not think about this, but it seems a good idea, I will experiment 
on this.

>   If the DXF file doesn't have smooth triangles, then why would you 
> want to make them smooth? Not all meshes are smooth.
AFAIK there is not such thing as a smooth triangle in DXF, everything is 
exported as 3DFACE. Even if it exists, I checked out various modellers 
and they export "faceted" and "smoothed" meshes with the same code where 
no information about the normals is given. So in any case I need to 
reconstruct that information.

I have not found a good DXF to POV converter (if not a really old and 
buggy one for Mac) and so I decided to write my own wih the features I 
need.

Regards,
Riccardo

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