In article <3a07abfe@news.povray.org>, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> 
wrote:

> Chris Huff <chr### [at] maccom> wrote:
> : I certainly wouldn't want to manually position that many 
> : glows...
> 
> ... when it would be much easier to put them in a union and translate this
> union.

How are they generated? I still wouldn't want to manually create that 
many glows, even in a union.
Besides, why won't the workaround of creating them with a macro work? 
You can put the transformation in the macro, and call it multiple times 
to give them different positions, colors, etc. A pretty clumsy 
workaround, but it should work.

It will probably be a while before I can get them working in unions, 
though I am looking at the problem...basically what I am planning is a 
dynamically allocated array of pointers to glows. The glows will still 
be located in the main list, but they will have additional pointers in 
the union. Since I have never used an array of this type, I will 
probably wait until I see Mark Wagner's spline code. And I will have to 
make sure that stale pointers are never used...etc, etc...

BTW, another thing I have been thinking of adding: a "multiglow" or 
compound glow. Basically a glow with multiple locations, it would act 
like a group of glows having everything but location identical. The main 
advantage would be memory, you would only have to store another vector 
to make each new glow. There might also be a slight speed gain, since it 
would eliminate walking along a linked list...but probably not 
noticeable. What do you think?
A glow that follows a spline instead of originating from a point could 
also be useful...but will take quite a bit of coding.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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