"Jim Charter" <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote in message 
news:47b3915a$1@news.povray.org...
>>
>> I spent last night working on a macro for a label to go round angled 
>> multi-facetted polyhedron with bevelled and rounded corners, such as your 
>> octagonal bottle. I've got the macro to do the shape.
>
> Perhaps the bottles themselve might lend to using csg, the mesh macros I 
> am using are quite clunky and a little difficult to really make bullet 
> proof.
>

I think the mesh generated ones look really great. I used CSG for a plastic 
bottle and it looked very regular; OK for plastic, but, IMO, too regular for 
glass. It may be possible to add distortions to the surface normals, but 
meshes are inherently less regular and retain the potential to allow you to 
add randomness into the surface shape itself. I would recommend sticking 
with meshes for this, particularly given the excellent results you've shown 
here.

The CSG SDL I've written for the labels macro is also getting a bit clunky, 
despite a number of rewrites, and all that does is to generate a thin strip 
around a regular object. I suspect that to do a generic piece of SDL to 
handle the transition from the angled sides to the cylindrical bottle neck 
would be pretty tricky using just CSG.

If you're having difficulty making the macros bullet proof, you may like to 
consider an idea I've used to make the label generator more user friendly. 
I've created a series of include files, with each holding the parameter 
settings for a particular label. Inexperienced users can therefore generate 
one of the standard labels without getting their hands dirty.

Less timid users can copy a file that is close to what they want and just 
tweak the bits they need without necessarily understanding many of the 
settings. More adventurous users can dig into the macro calls, but will 
obviously have to learn more about how they work to use them.

I think the bottles you've done would make great additions to the object 
collection, even if the only changes that a user can make are to scale them. 
Any additional configuration settings would be icing on the cake.

Regards,
Chris B.

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