Wow! Weird to see your own name pop up 9 months after asking a question!
As to why I wanted such a small numerical value for the radius, at the
time I was trying to produce a scene for the POV City project and the
scale to be used was fixed (I think at the time it was something like 1
POV unit to 25m). This led to some things having way small dimensions,
hence the problem.

Anyway, POV City has since folded and I changed my mind about what the
scene was going to contain, so I'm not too bothered now. It's still
weird though...

Andrew

JK wrote:
> 
> Nieminen Mika wrote:
> 
> > JK <kla### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> > : a sphere in
> > : POV does consist of lots of flat pieces (but (phong)shaded so you don't
> > : notice).
> >
> >   Doh!
> >   AFAIK povray calculates mathematically perfect spheres, like a real
> > raytracer, not polyhedrons made of triangles like some scanline renderers.
> > (the mathematical intersection of a line and a sphere is easy to calculate)
> >   You have to prove your allegation.
> >
> > --
> >                                                               - Warp. -
> 
>   Oh, you're being so nice to me.
> OK, I'll have to admit that I didn't know this for a fact... and it seems I was
> wrong. (Lots of other 3d programs use polyhedrons, though... the assumption
> that POV did as well was wrong, and now that I think about it, it would be
> strange if POV would use those, since POV uses mathematical formulas (as
> clearly visible in the Poly object) to calculate objects.
> 
> So here it is: Nieminen Mika, you're right (... as if you didn't know already
> huh? ;-)
> 
> But hey, I was in a state of despair: there was really something weird going
> on. Since you're into the inner workings of POV, maybe you know the answer. Or
> perhaps I was right about at least one thing. Now I'm really curious... Is it a
> bug or not?
> (take a look at the source Andrew Hedges gave)
> 
> JK

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