In article <3a0920e8@news.povray.org>, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> 
wrote:

>   What I wonder why it can't work like a light_source. You can put a
> light_source inside a CSG and all transformations applied to the CSG will
> transform the light_source as well. Why the glow can't work in the same
> way?

Because it isn't implemented yet!
Light sources are different, they are objects. Glows aren't, they are a 
much simpler structure, and changing them to be objects isn't easy and 
would consume more memory, so I am going to try a different tactic of 
allowing them to be attached to objects. And have you looked at the 
current state of the CSG parsing code?


>   It breaks entirely the ideology and structure of a CSG if some sub-part 
> of it is not transformed by outer transformations.
>   Besides this, it's not easy at all to calculate the right location 
> value inside the glow-block.
>   Also if you change any of the transformations of the CSG, everything 
> else changes accordingly, except the glow, which you have to remember 
> to recalculate again.

Which is why I am trying to fix that.
Originally, the glow was a light_source effect. I separated it out so it 
was an atmospheric effect, like fog, that could be attached to a light 
source. I then added more object-like features to it...but it is not an 
object, so much of this stuff that happens semi-automatically with 
objects needs to be done manually.


>   Btw, I think there could be better (and faster and less 
> memory-consuming) ways of storing the glows than a linked list.
>   Just imagine if the triangles of a mesh were in a linked list... ;)

Nearly everything in POV is a linked list...light sources, objects, in 
my particle_system patch the particles are in a list, etc...it would be 
nice if POV provided some standard functions for allocating, copying, 
inserting and deleting parts of, and resizing arrays. For allowing the 
glows to be specified in an array, I am attempting to make a dynamically 
allocated and resized array of pointers to glows...my last attempt 
crashed my computer hard.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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