Well, I've carried this as far as I know how. I have just posted a
zip file in povray.binaries.scene-files (hope that's an appropriate
choice) containing a file called triscan.mcr, a readme file, and 
5 demo scenes illustrating its use. 

Some of you may remember a few weeks ago when I posted regarding
the possibility of using the trace() function to produce simulated
surface scanning as an alternate means of producing tesselated
versions of POV-Ray's primitives. The results of my experiments
were mixed, but somewhat useful. I have used this macro to...

Scan to RAW and from there convert to any number of other formats
that could then be used in other packages like Rhino and Poser as
props/reference shapes to aid in scaling, sculpting, posing, and
positioning models intended to be reimported back into POV for
use with the original from which the scan was made.

Converted such things as julia fractals into Moray UDO/INC pairs
where the INC file contains a declared reference to the actual
POV julia (as opposed to a mesh approximation), allowing such
non-supported items to be used in Moray scenes.

Converted simple CSG constructs into Leveller reference shapes
which could be read directly into Leveller so that landscapes
could be sculpted around them (think houses, bridges, walls,
etc.)

It does NOT, however, produce high quality tesselations. Some
detail is inevitably lost by the fact that most converters and
modellers I've been working with toss out normals in favor of
their own computations, and there are a few inherant "false 
culling" errors that I've only partially managed to overcome,
in several weeks of experiments, and I'm convinced that if it
can be done better, I don't know how. I think, really that to
produce better quality would require binary patches rather than
a scripted approach, but nonetheless, in the hopes this will 
be of use to others, I have posted my best efforts.

Charles

Post a reply to this message