Tom Stone wrote:
> 
> Gilles Tran wrote:
> 
> Are you really sure about that?
> Warp said opposite, in a rather forceful way that felt pretty intimidating.
> According to him, it seemed like no one of us needed any converters,
> and that I was more or less an idiot for believing so. And Ken have
> expressed similar sentiments.

No, you didn't understand Warp (or Ken). Gilles is right.


Another way to explain things:

mesh2 is a POV object. Anybody can use a POV object. Take
your editor, write the text file, that's it. bicubic_patch
and mesh also are objects. Go use them.

But... mesh, mesh2 and bicubic_patch are sooo tedious to
code by hand. Just an infinite list of numbers. Almost no
human could write them by hand. At least not a useful number
of them.

So... you need a program to write them! Programs do "dumb"
things quickly, and generating several thousands of meshes
and bicubic_patch values is their job.

Now... how will the program create the objects? The program
can't "guess" them. It can use an algorithm to create
them: Someone could create a program that takes a point and
a radius as a parameter and outputs a pseudo-sphere made of
thousands of triangles. That's what most modelers do, indeed.

Or... The program could read a Poser object, decode it, and
write thousands of meshes to represent the object. That's a
converter.

Warp... has done a POV script that outputs mesh2 objects.
I have not looked at it, so I don't know what it uses as
input. But clearly, from what Warp and Gilles wrote, Warp's
script doesn't read Poser objects (or whatever objects).

So... you still need a converter from Whatever(tm) Object
format to POV mesh2 objects. That's your personal need.
But other people (like Warp) have personal uses of mesh2
that differ from yours. And those personal uses can work
on many platforms, as Warp's script do.

BTW: You might have misunderstood, in the previous messages,
some informations about the converters. Basically, every
Mac application programmer was waiting for a definitive
POV version before offering to output "mesh2" objects. Once
the beta is over, it is likely that software packages like
Poser will support it (if not, ask them).


Hope this finally clears things out.

-- 
Adrien Beau - adr### [at] freefr - http://adrien.beau.free.fr
 Mes propos n'engagent que moi et en aucun cas mes employeurs

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