POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.general : Heightfield applied to mesh : Re: Heightfield applied to mesh Server Time
4 Nov 2024 13:01:40 EST (-0500)
  Re: Heightfield applied to mesh  
From: Hugo Asm
Date: 12 Dec 2003 16:04:14
Message: <3fda2d4e@news.povray.org>
To my knowledge there are no POV-macros available to do the job on any kind
of mesh. It's relative easy to code one, provided you have - or can
calculate - the surface normals.

Bear in mind though, that your mesh needs to be very dense for "surface
displacement" to look good. This needs a lot of memory - sometimes wasted
memory, if your bitmap/pattern is not very bumpy then it will just waste
triangles.

That is why you will usually benefit A LOT from doing a "triangle
decimation" after the displacement has taken place. That means, redundant
triangles are removed and the resulting holes are nicely triangulated.
Currently the most efficient way to do all this, in my opinion, is a
commercial modeller like 3dsMAX. If you don't have access to that program,
it's going to be more complicated. You can use 3 small applications:

1) Poseray OBJ 2 POV converter (Freeware, and it has some kind of surface
displacement algoritm. I think your mesh needs UV vectors for this to work)
2) Wizup Optimiser (Free version only works with small meshes .. can do
triangle decimation)
3) A multi-converter will be handy. The "Wizup Optimiser" only works in VRML
format. I haven't found a freeware converter for this that *work*.

Regards,
Hugo


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