In article <web.3dca7ae6e6f4bb4af9811eb00@news.povray.org>,
 "normdoering" <nor### [at] yahoocom> wrote:

> What are marching cubes?

It's an algorithm for automatically creating a mesh from an arbitrary 
mathematically defined object. A patented method, actually...there are 
other similar non patented methods. The basic idea is to sample the idea 
on a 3D lattice to find connected points on its surface.


> Is there a way you could make height fields more flexible? Make it so you
> can bend, wrap, join height field into a 3D object, like a head or skull?

Doing so would lose the speed advantages of a height field, you might as 
well use a mesh. You could write macros to generate a mesh with all the 
distortions you want, look at the height field macros in shapes.inc for 
examples. Parsing will be slow, though.


> Don't tell me a height field isn't a wireframe internally... It doesn't
> matter, a grey scale picture should certainly easily become a wireframe.

It isn't, and it does matter. POV can't render wireframes, they are 
impossible to raytrace. Wireframe is a rendering method where lines 
(wires) are drawn to the image, not a kind of shape. Again, what you are 
seeing is simply a rendering error...in this case, one I've never seen.

-- 
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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