Hi

> What kind of flower?

Should get a Violet. If ever. Only a single petal right now. But this time
the texture got better.
Unfortunately it seems that I have to get on a business trip soon, so again
delays. Maybe I have to stop PoVing in general.

> Well, I meant the texture-modelling, like what finishes to use,
> patterns and colors, normals (if any or rather use turbulenced
> mesh)...

Yes of course. Because of this I meant "don't remind me" since I never get
it right. Maybe I'm simply to stupid? *g* I am not talented in texturing.

> Are you doing UV-Mapping on the fern or flowers? I'm thinking if

No. The whole fern is a -single- mesh. To apply the textures along the
freely rotateable leaves I build a texture cache which holds the base
texture in all needed rotations (in steps of currently 20 degrees) which are
the applied to every single triangle of the mesh. Of course there are other
textures for the stems, which don't need to be rotated since the have no
direction-dependent texture. This is different to the leaves which have (in
full LOD only) some gradient pattern (in +/-45 degrees side-dependent
rotation)

> that wouldn't make some things easier, for example gradients of
> colors which band from the stem to the outside rim...

Exactly. That's solved as described above. Not elegant but works.

> Well, take 3DS-Max, or Cineme4D, and you'll end up using
> meshes all the time. As I gather, there has been a recent mesh-fanatism
> going on, with tesselation of complex objects etc.

Indeed. Initially I wanted to use meshes only for the leaves but not for all
the rest. I ended up with meshes since tracing was really slow due to
thousands of objects (the stems were built using unions of cylinders).
Now tracing is really fast plus the advantage to save the whole mesh in a
single file which speeds up any subsequent parsing dramatically (several
hours to create the fern but once created it is parsed within minutes, even
at 100MB).

Hope to see soon your proceedings! Looks very promising already.
best regards,
SY

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