Tom Stone <tom### [at] teliacom> wrote:
: 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.

  I have never said anything like that.
  What I said is that you don't *necessarily* need an external program in
order to create a mesh2, as you can create one yourself.
  The mesh2 is not some kind of inaccessible binary encrypted file which can
only be created by sophisticated programs which mere mortals can't understand.
The mesh2 format is just a plain and easily readable ascii format which you
can write yourself by hand if you wish. It's not even very cryptic, but quite
logical. It's also absolutely platform-independent; it doesn't contain anything
that would depend on a certain system.
  Of course this doesn't mean it's easy. As meshes just contain vertex points
and a whole surface is built up with triangles using those vertex points, it's
near impossible to make anything really complex just by writing numbers by
hand.
  There are mainly three ways of creating a mesh/mesh2:

  - You just write one by hand by entering coordinates. Usually this is
limited to extremely simple shapes such as boxes because it becomes just too
difficult to do anything more complicated (forget about making a human face
by entering vertex coordinates by hand).

  - You can algorithmically generate (with POV-Ray SDL) a mesh. With this you
can do a lot more complicated things with lots of triangles. One simple example
is to create a spherical surface with thousands of triangles.
  Here you basically just write a POV-Ray script which creates the mesh using
math.

  - You can use a third-party program which has the ability of writing a
triangle mesh in POV-Ray format. What the program does is just to generate
the mesh in POV-Ray format (the exact same format which you can write by
hand) from some input (usually a mesh in another non-pov format).

-- 
#macro N(D,I)#if(I<6)cylinder{M()#local D[I]=div(D[I],104);M().5,2pigment{
rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

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