On 27 Jul 1999 02:24:32 -0400, Nieminen Mika <war### [at] cctutfi> wrote:

>  A question:
>  Is all this triangulation of objects worth the efforts? Ok, you get a
>preview. So what? I think that there are many other things more important
>for the povteam to do than worrying about previews. Making trianguation
>code for _all_ the objects is not a trivial thing and the benefits are
>questionable. If you want a preview, use a modeller.

(been out of town for a while)

I wasn't talking about _all_ objects. Heaven forbid! I was only
replying to Ron who said Julias can't be triangulated and then to
Margus who didn't see the sense in doing it. So I mentioned the major
beneft of tesellating this particular object, mainly implementing it
in Moray and other modellers since it is a shape that's hard to
visualize by only knowing the numbers involved. And once you have it
as a mesh in a modeller you can export it to whatever format you like,
so that even Lance can have some fun of it with MAX :) Or, as I
(humorously?) suggested, you can export it to VRML, put a motherload
of colored lights around it and start spinning it realtime until you
get hypnotized (or throw up, or both :) ) 

>  And besides, implementing an OpenGL or whatever preview would make povray
>non-portable.

Actually OpenGL is quite portable. Well, Crays don't have it, but then
again, you'll see a raytraced preview on a Cray, so... :) But don't
get me wrong here, I agree that integrating an OpenGL preview system
for all objects from within POV would be hard, hard to port and
generally senseless work. I've never claimed the opposite.


Peter Popov
ICQ: 15002700

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