"Shay" <sah### [at] simcopartscom> wrote in message
news:3f5e1945@news.povray.org...

Two pictures here. The first picture is the POV mesh made directly from
the map data. It can be seen that there is more detail, especially on
the steep areas, than with the Max mesh. The Max mesh does have the
"advantage" that with a given number of vertices, a greater percentage
of those will be on the curved parts of the mesh. The POV mesh, however,
has an even greater advantage in that all of the vertices are evenly
spaced and all of the triangles close to the same size. This gives
plainly nicer smoothing normals even in the less dense curved portions.
It would actually be simple to add more vertices to the curved portions
in the mesh, but I tried to get as close to the vertex count in the Max
mesh as possible.

Onto the second picture. The other, larger advantage of the POV mesh's
having its vertices evenly spaced is that further shaping can be done.
The Max mesh is essentially "dead." The second picture is the first mesh
with an additional movement applied (points to whomever can guess the
nature of my "cragginess" filter). There are a few triangle artifacts in
the second, but this is only due to my having produced it half455edly. I
could in the very least retriangulate the quads and make the second mesh
much nicer, but even that would not be necessary on anything but a very
course mesh like this.

The Max rounded curve advantage is only such on coarse meshes. As the
resolution of the mesh increases, the Max advantage disappears. At
least, this is how I see it. Hugo? Mike? Others?

 -Shay

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'pov_hf.jpg' (14 KB) Download 'pov_hf_post_filter.jpg' (14 KB)

Preview of image 'pov_hf.jpg'

Preview of image 'pov_hf_post_filter.jpg'