In article <3d6f4fa4@news.povray.org>,
 "Niki Estner" <nik### [at] freenetde> wrote:

> Ok, now this is really off-topic, but did anyone ever think about
> hyper-textures? I read about it in theory some time ago, but I don't really
> have an idea about where to start.

I'm not sure what "hypertextures" are, but I think they have something 
to do with actually deforming the surface of the object. POV is a 
raytracer that traces most shapes directly, it doesn't reduce everything 
to triangles, so doing real deformation would require tesselating the 
objects into a triangle meshe or tracing curved rays. The former has 
problems like high memory use and triangle artifacts, the latter would 
just barely be possible by approximating the curved ray with many short 
straight ray segments, and would be very slow and still limited.
Giving a way to tesselate shapes into meshes and a way to deform meshes 
might be sufficient.


> I guess modifying the isosurface object, so it wraps around a given object
> (spheres, boxes, cylinders, heightfields come right to my mind), and
> limiting it so some optimizations can be done to it, while keeping it
> general enough for most effects (hair, grass, wool, cloth, stones, sand,
> broken wood, etc).

I'm not really sure what you mean, or that you understand isosurfaces. 
There are existing functions for the shapes you listed, but not every 
primitive POV supports can be done as an isosurface. You can't just wrap 
an isosurface around another object, you can usually design the function 
to make a similar surface though. Are you talking about built-in 
isosurface functions for making displaced versions of the basic 
primitives, so a user defined function doesn't have to be interpreted?

-- 
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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