Dan Connelly <djc### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> The #1 feature I'd like to see is support for "rounded corners".

  Their problem is that automatically creating rounded corners for any
given object:

1) is impossible in the general case,

2) in many cases where it's possible it results in extremely slow renders,

3) would require tesselating the object and rendering the resulting mesh
   (with the corner modifications).

  In mesh/NURBS modellers rounding corners is an extremely trivial thing
to do. That's because they only handle triangle meshes (or NURBS, which
are equally easy to handle) and can subdivide and modify the vertices
freely.

  POV-Ray, however, handles mathematical primitives (such as boxes and
planes) and their CSG. Rounding their corners is a problem which is
several orders of magnitude harder.

  One possibility for POV-Ray 4 would be to drastically increase its
support for creating and handling triangle meshes (by scripting). If
most of the primitives and CSG could be automatically converted to
triangle meshes (by cleverly designed scripts), it would then be
relatively easy to create other scripts which would perform subdvision
and transformations (non-linear transfromations, edge rounding, etc)
of those meshes.

  This way you still can't round the edges of existing objects, but at
least you would have better tools to re-create those objects as meshes,
and then transfrom those.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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