In article <3c62965e@news.povray.org>,
 "Felix Wiemann" <Fel### [at] gmxnet> wrote:

> It's not possible to create a wireframe with POV-Ray like a renderer does,
> because the thickness of the lines will be less (or the lines disappear)
> when the object is far away from the camera. A renderer always makes 1 pixel
> lines.

Ahem...POV-Ray *is* a "renderer". A renderer is just a piece of software 
that creates an image.
The previews you see in modellers are usually scanline renderers which 
take a large number of triangles as input and draw them one by one on 
the image. Since it already has the triangle data, it can easily just 
draw lines for the triangle sides instead of drawing the whole triangle.

POV is a raytracer, and computes the image pixel by pixel, sending rays 
into the scene and intersecting them with surfaces, which usually are 
intersected directly instead of being reduced to triangles. There is no 
way to know that a line pixel should be drawn, and an object just big 
enough to cover a pixel at a certain distance is likely to get missed 
and will either get fat or disappear as the distance changes, so 
simulating a wireframe with textures of a bunch of cylinders still has 
problems. It also won't be any faster than ordinary rendering, and the 
only reason modellers use it is for speed.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom>
POV-Ray TAG e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
TAG web site: http://tag.povray.org/

Post a reply to this message