In article <web.3dcae45a195c50e490f0db7e0@news.povray.org>,
 "normdoering" <nor### [at] yahoocom> wrote:

> Yes, and that's the key. I want to make meshes using a kind of image_map
> function. That "pixelation" is the essence of a mesh.

Um, no...it is the "essence" of a rasterized image. I suppose it's 
possible it might create render errors in a grid formation when you get 
the camera too close for the isosurface settings, but I don't see how it 
could look that way with a height field.


> That isosurface is taking 2D vectors and creating a z value from its 
> greyscale to give you the full x,y,z definition of a mesh vector or 
> point. I'm talking about patching pov so that it outputs that mesh... 
> not a picture, it outputs a mesh file.

Listen: Just open up shapes.inc and look at the height field macros. You 
might be able to do what you want with no modifications to them, or you 
may need to copy them to another file and customize them or write your 
own macros using the same techniques.
You can generate the mesh with whatever data you want this way, no need 
to build a mesh and then modify it. If you want, though, you could write 
it out in a data file readable by the #fread directive instead of a mesh 
object file, then you could generate a basic mesh and then modify it. 
The PCM macros apparently support this kind of thing, you don't have to 
write it all yourself.
No need to patch POV for this, the existing version is capable enough.

More advanced mesh composition features have been discussed before in 
these newsgroups, you might want to look at those threads, it sounds 
like the features you want would be mostly covered. The only real 
benefits are parse speed and convenience though, and it has nothing to 
do with your misunderstanding of isosurfaces which started this thread.

-- 
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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