"clipka"  wrote in message news:51f1e517$1@news.povray.org...

> Did you consider punching the hole through the petal /after/
> adding the extrusion? That might allow for a simpler extrusion,
> as you won't need to punch a separate hole through it.

The most obvious way to save those "extra" holes would be to subtract 24 
holes from 13*24+1 (13 each for optimized extrusions minus one hole and then 
one sphere) objects. More elegant than the way I'm doing it now, but I'd 
lose my individual bounding objects. I'm no programmer, but I know enough to 
know that premature optimization is the root of all evil (even if it is it's 
own fun little riddle).

> I've got all the math sorted out by now (except for the more complex hole 
> extrusion stuff), so modifying the thing for e.g. 7-fold instead of 8-fold 
> symmetry, changing the petals' size and other some such would now be a 
> piece of cake; no manual tweaking anymore.

Nice. Though manual tweaking does have a silver lining. Once I make 
something *too* easy, I have to face the temptation of re-using the same 
tool over and over again. There's something to be said for looking at each 
component and thinking "how the hell am I going to pull that off?"

> As long as you code just for the fun of it, my stance is that coding is 
> fair game for everyone in every way they like.

Hear! Hear!

Right now, I'm trying to forget half of what I *do* know about programming. 
I see myself doing less programming in the future, so I want to downsize to 
a more maintainable skillset. Honestly, I can understand Perl I wrote 9 
years ago better that some of the Python I wrote 2 years ago. Conscious 
competence *quickly* withers on the vine.

> (And no, I have not the slightest idea what a chiasmus is - I'd have to 
> google that ;-))

You're familiar with the structure, even if you don't know the word.
The definition might build your vocabulary, but it won't re-build your 
narrative.

-Shay

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