Nathan Kopp wrote:

> NURBS are nothing without a good modeler.

Rhino? It will be available soon.  If there is easier way to integrate it with
PovRay than meshes, then I consider of purchasing it, but I don't want spend money,
if  I have to fiddle with huge file sizes.

> It would be fairly easy to modify
> the current Bezier code to handle simple NURBS surfaces... or at least
> non-trimmed NURBS.  Trimmed NURBS are quite difficult, IMHO.  It all boils down
> to tesselating the surface into an internal triangle representation.

> However, modelers can already do the tesselation easily.  I've been working on
> a compact mesh syntax with Thomas Baier for 3DS-to-POV conversions that would
> also work to greatly reduce the size of any triangle mesh POV file.

Can You explain Your work? What do You mean by "reduce the size of any triangle
mesh file"? I've tried by myself patching PovRay to be able to read binary mesh
files (my custom format, where textual representation was replaced with direct
binary representation of float numbers). This drop parsing time for my scene from
80 to 30 second and files were smaller as well (by 40 % if I remember correctly).

May-be it's easier to use converter instead of patching PovRay. I don't know, how
long it will take to patch Povray, for as I said, I'm not expert in this field. And
I don't know, whether it will produce better outcome (parsing time will be
supposedly smaller, but if rendering time goes high, then it is useless).

P.S. May-be it would be better, if there is some repository of PovRay patch (and
utility) ideas and if someone works with something, then he makes entry to this
repository, so people will know, what's going on.

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