"clipka"  wrote in message news:51f25051$1@news.povray.org...

> - CSG scene: Any scene that defines all its complex shapes as unions,
> merges, intersections and/or differences of less complex solid shapes 
> (which in turn might also be defined this way); after all, that is exactly 
> what "CSG" means: "Constructive Solid Geometry". (In the strict sense this 
> would even allow for meshes, provided they have an inside_vector, but I'd 
> be ok with still disallowing them.)

> - Hand-coded scene: Any scene that was created using nothing more than a 
> text editor and POV-Ray itself.

> The two terms are perfectly orthogonal: The shapes in a CSG scene can be 
> both hand-coded and/or created with a CSG modeling tool, and a hand-coded 
> scene can have both CSG shapes and/or non-CSG shapes.

Not perfectly, we can quibble on the definition of "strict sense" you 
mentioned above. Even a triangle, can be replaced by a compound (ok, 
difference) of planes.

If linear prisms are allowed, will curved prisms be allowed as well? I don’t 
completely disagree with allowing linear prisms as a shortcut, but there's 
something nice about being able to say a shape is made from planes, spheres, 
boxes, cones, cylinders, and tori (rings). These shapes (ok, maybe not 
planes) are known to children. Most people think of a prism as something to 
make rainbows out of sunlight.

-Shay

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