Stepping in on this little discussion...

"Philippe Debar" <phd### [at] wanadoobe> wrote in message
news:3e24ff65@news.povray.org...
>
> "Ken" <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote in message
> news:3E23DCD8.B37F4AFB@pacbell.net...
> > > "hollow" should work too.
> >
> > It does, but it also confuses the issue of surface normals so I chose
not
> > to use it in my example.
>
> Yes, the "hollow" keyword is confusing. But I believed the normals were
> unaffected. Aren't they? What I understood is that the object still has a
> clearly determined outside and inside - hence you can use interior{}and
csg,
> but you need to hollow the object to fill it with media.

Right.

> Is there any planned change for that behaviour?

Not that I know of, except I'm sure this general subject must have been
talked about in the past. Something of a hierarchy for combining or
separating medias. Those two words would label it well I think, combine or
separate. I haven't looked at the media source code but it doesn't sound
that easy to change. It would mean per object media mixing as is already
done within interiors having more than one media statement present, so it
would need to check all other object interiors.

> I do not understand why you need "hollow" to use interior{media} and not
> (iirc) interior{ior} (And I really mean that I do not understand, not
> anything else - there are probably technical reasons, I just do not know
> them) . Is there any case where there is an advantage in using an
> interior{media} in a non hollow object? BTW I'd be happy to be able to
have
> an object inside a media to be filled either by it's own media only or
with
> it's and the surrounding medias without having to use tricky csg.

It's really a pre-media thing, when 'atmosphere' came along it applied to
that as well; and finally media too, since it could also be global. I
couldn't tell you the exact reasoning but that's probably why 'hollow' is
the defacto way to produce a surface shell rather than the usual solid
object.

As to what you asked there, "Is there any case where there is an advantage
in using an interior{media} in a non-hollow object?", I guess you are saying
again that hollow is redundant if media exists at all on a per object basis.
And you answer your own question in the sense that it would be good to mix
and match medias with more control, and it's CSG or global media that
becomes tricky as it stands now.

--
Farewell,
Bob

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