Anton Sherwood wrote in message <358### [at] jpsnet>...
>I wrote:
>> Is there an easy way to approximate a minimal surface (soap film)
>> spanning a skew polygon?
>
>Afterthought: Failing that, if I slice it into flat triangles,
>is there a trick with "normal" to hide the facets?


Sure.
Use the "smooth_triangle" instead of the "triangle". With it you specify a
normal vector for each vertex of the triangle and POV-Ray uses the
information to interpolate the shading of the triangle so that it looks
smooth. Of course it doesn't work very good if the angle between the edges
is too large (like "smoothing" a cube to look like a sphere will not work),
but for the most triangle meshes it works ok.

See this URL (the whole thing including the "td=6" at the end is the URL) on
a discussion how those normals can be calculated. Also there is a tool
around that smoothes POV-Ray meshes. Sorry, don't have the URL...

http://heron.cc.ukans.edu/ebt-bin/nph-dweb/dynaweb/SGI_Developer/OpenGL_PG/@
Generic__BookTextView/27318;cd=7;td=6


Hope it helps,
Johannes.

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