During one of my research projects, I needed to quickly create the
ray-tracing images of subdivision surfaces. What I did is to subdivide
the object offline and import the subdivided surface into Pov-Ray,
which of course led to huge pov-ray files.

I found it extremely convenient to have the mesh2 object directly support
the subdivision algorithms. So I and another student (Jianhua Fan) spent
some
time to expand the mesh2 object so that it can be directly used to
generate smooth subdivision surfaces.

The new syntax would be:
   mesh2 {
        subdivision {
             substeps n              // n= steps of subdivision
             flatshading              // optional flag to set flat shading
        }

       vertex_list ...
       ...
   }

Anyway, the examples and new executable can be downloaded from

  http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~xwu/Pov-Sub

This is different to SSS from Mr. John VanSickle in that this doesn't
require
rewriting the existing mesh2 object. If the original scene is built using
mesh2,
it will take a minute to generate a scene with subdivided meshes.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.
-
Xiaobin Wu
xwu### [at] ciseufledu

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