Andrew Woodfin wrote:
> 
> I'm about to work on supportng blobs and meshes, and yeah, I've also thought "why
> not just use a height field?" But it seems like with
> blobs you could get something a little more organic looking. My hope is to come up
> with something that might be able to convert 2D
> images back into something like 3D representations, say with faces and figures.
> Problem is, what is POV-Ray going to say when I give it 7,000 blobs?!
> It can already change height according to color, this is most pronounced with
> cylinders as the objects. It turns out looking somewhat
> like those beds of pins you see in toy stores that can record an impression of,
> e.g., your face or hand. The result of this is pictured
> below, with the original image in the corner.
> You can get the "latest version" of TGAMosaic from www.coe.uncc.edu/~adwoodfi and
> see a few more results with it. The page needs to cleaned up a little bit, and I
> have quite a few other weirder looking outputs that need to be posted.
> 
> Andy


Hi Andy,

  Although I have not commented on your work yet it is not becuase I
have no interest in a project such as this. The very first time I
visited Chris Colefax's home page I discovered his list of possible
future projects complete with a suggestion link. I used it and detailed
a utility that has virtualy every feature you have mentioned so far
on this subject. Chris informed me that he would consider it but
I never did see it added to the master list of future project ideas.

  Not one to be daunted so easily I have since held discussions with
two other people about a utility of this type and even got so far as
encourageing one of them to write some code for it. Unfortunately
he was stingy and never shared his new toy with me.

  So where am I going with all of this ? No where in particular. I just
thought you might find it interesting to know that someone else has
had parallel thoughts on this subject. I will download a copy of your
latest edition and give it a whirl.

  A quick point of order concerning using mesh objects for an optional
output:, I believe you would definatly be ahead of the game memory wise
going that route than attempting to do the same with blobs. I do not
believe that blobs are anywhere near as close in optimization as the
triangle object types are. The calculations for the interelationships
between the blobs would have to mean a much larger memeory hit than the
standard Pov primites would.

 Keep up the good work and you have my full support and backing on this
project. I have waited a very long time for this to surface and I am
glad I was here when it did. If you need anything, except money, let me
know what I can do to help.

-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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