In article <3aac18cb@news.povray.org>, "Spock" <spo### [at] nospamcom> 
wrote:

> Correct me if I am wrong, but I think the triangle and the plane are the
> only 2D shapes that can be rendered by POV, regardless of orientation.

You're wrong...the 2D surfaces POV supports are triangles (including 
smooth_triangles), discs, and polygons. It also has bicubic_patches, but 
even though they are infinitely thin, they are curved in 3 dimensions, 
not restricted to a 2D plane.
Plane objects are not 2D, but infinite 3D surfaces. They divide the 
"universe" into 2 halves, one is "inside" the plane.


> Perhaps you could use CSG to hack interesting shapes out of a plane 
> (I don't know if this is possible)...  but I think my brain would 
> overload if I tried this in arbitrary 3-space.  Might be better to 
> carve the plane while it is lying flat and then move it into place.

Not with CSG (unless you wanted a polygon with thickness), but you could 
try using clipped_by to do it.


> In the specific example you describe I would build the pentagon out 
> of triangles and encode everything in a macro to minimize the impact 
> on my other code.  You might choose to pass the centre, normal, and 
> radius to the macro to provide one-stop shopping.

This would probably be the easiest way to do it.

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

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