Peter Cracknell <pc### [at] lineonenet> wrote:
> I've been using POV a little while now and I'm getting through all the
> things possible.  I've learnt most of the code understood lighting and
> cameras and got a bit on animation.  Moray is quite easy too, only things
> left media and meshes/bicubic patches etc.  I've been playing with Chris
> Colefex's hair, which I must say is amazing, there are so many options and
> it is by far the best around that I have seen.  Though it uses meshes, and
> I've been using the sphere that came with it.  Is there anyway to convert
> blobs to meshes?  This would be absolutely ideal as otherwise I'm gonna
have
> to redo the blobs using the sphere PCM file that came with it and that
would
> make it really slow.  Basically any help/links or info on meshes and an
> answer to my question would be very highly appreciated to help me out.

It is possible to convert blobs to triangle meshes: any polygon renderer
that supports metaballs does this (Truespace, etc).  In fact, PolyRay will
also do this (it can triangulise all of its objects for displacement
mapping, wireframe preview, and exporting to mesh formats).  POV-Ray,
though, cannot - although it should be possible to use Ron Parker's trace {}
function (currently SuperPatch only) to extract the triangle co-ordinates
or, indeed, as has already been done, to place objects such as hair directly
onto a blob surface.

At any rate, even if you did convert your bear model to a mesh I suspect
covering the surface with my macro file would take quite a while... a
quicker option might be to fake the fur using textures and/or media.  I've
posted a message in binaries.images showing two possible methods: both use
larger copies of the base surface, and these should be quite easy to make
for a blob model simply by creating a second copy of the blob with a lower
threshold.

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