In article <3D5E61F0.618B8540@aol.com>, Dave Dunn <poi### [at] aolcom> 
wrote:

> Hmm, hope this doesn't get too far off topic, but I believe there was a debate
> a few months back on povray.general about the concept of finish maps. I don't
> know what the technical limitations are on actually programming them into POV,
> but it seems to make logical sense to have pigment/normal/finish all accept
> the same patterns - this is especially useful for "cutaway," that is,
> partially-transparent patterns. The conventional wisdom is to simply make a
> texture map with various materials, but that is the hard way IMO.

One possibility would be to allow you to specify a function for any 
float, color, or vector value in the finish...would that satisfy you? ;-)
There would be a small speed penalty from the overhead of choosing 
between a function and a constant, but an enormous increase in 
flexibility. It would require lots of rewriting though.

-- 
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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