In article <3bc7683b@news.povray.org> , Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg>  wrote:

>   I must confess that I don't understand the logic behind the current
> behaviour. Wouldn't it be more logical to just convert the color to b/w and
> take that as height?

I think there are good arguments for and against both ways.

I think the "normal" way to create a hfield is to take some image and
process it with either a special program or photo editor to get the desired
look.  In both cases one would expect the export of a grayscale image.  No
human can reliably comprehend how a rgb-image will look like when it is
converted to grayscale without seeing the result.  So this task is best done
in a program.  POV-Ray allows you to even work with programs that don't
support grayscale images in an easy way by using just one component of a
color image without having to consider a possibly complicated color to
grayscale conversion.

Then there is the less frequent and less useful (I guess) use of a color
photo or something similar as a hfield.  In this case the optimal solution
would be to do a good grayscale conversion of the color information.

I don't use hfields (or POV-Ray) a lot, and I actually don't have a problem
with either way.  If there are more requests to make it convert to grayscale
for 16-bit per color component images, I would be happy to do so...


    Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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