In article <3dcc3148@news.povray.org>, Simon Adameit <gom### [at] gmxde> 
wrote:

> Do you consider this to be some kind of volumetric rendering?
> 
> http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~henrik/papers/psp/

Interesting...somewhat like a blob or isosurface, but not. No more 
foolproof than converting to a mesh, and probably prone to other errors, 
but probably useful for data from real world objects. It has 
restrictions that seem to make the kind of point data being discussed 
here useless. It needs a lot of points, and probably doesn't do well 
with thin areas (where the thickness of the object is close to or lower 
than the distance between points on the same "side", so the nearest 
point can be on the opposite side of the object). The paper says it is 
for extremely high resolution models, especially where triangles are 
smaller than pixels, and a mesh doesn't give any real benefit.

It isn't what I meant by volumetric rendering, but it does require 
sampling a volume...it seems to do "ray marching", stepping along the 
ray until point density goes above a threshold, then using the points 
within a certain distance of that location (though the abstract says 
within a distance to the ray, which doesn't seem to make sense) to 
figure out an approximation of the real distance.

That is a very interesting paper, I'm going to have a try at 
implementing that object...need to get some papers of my own written 
first, though. Homework...bleh.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

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