In article <web.3dcaecca195c50e490f0db7e0@news.povray.org>,
 "normdoering" <nor### [at] yahoocom> wrote:

> I mean you can "press" an image, like a jpeg, on to what will be the outer
> surface of a 3D "sculpture" with isosurfaces and then you can press other
> images onto other isosurfaces and rotate them and blob them together. If
> you think of the image that's pressed onto the isosurface as if it were a
> "mesh" (what I may mistakenly call a "wireframe") then you see a way to
> manipulate mesh files... by taking shallow "mesh sheets", think of it as a
> tinfoil sheet, and bringing them together with isosurface like functions,
> blobbing and such.

So far I've seen you say you want:
Output of isosurface mesh data (originally confusing it with "wireframe" 
rendering). It's been explained that this data doesn't exist, but that 
there is a patch that can generate a mesh approximation of most shapes, 
including the isosurface.

Output of depth information. That's a new one, I answered it in my other 
message. It just isn't very useful.

Reading of PCM files. They are already readable through macros, such a 
third party format designed for the scene language doesn't belong as a 
built in feature.

Some way to distort height fields. The answer is no, use a mesh instead. 
Height fields are intentionally made more specialized and less flexible 
as an optimization, they can be faster than an equivalent mesh. Meshes 
don't have the limitations, and are made for this kind of object.

A way to "blob" meshes together. There are several ways you could do 
this, all of them are complex algorithms that would require lots of 
coding. You aren't asking for a little thing here, your best bet is to 
look at a mesh modeller. Just look at the ones that are available, the 
POV-Ray web site has lots of them listed in the links pages.

And finally, a way to progressively modify a mesh. You probably don't 
need to actually generate the intermediate meshes, you can generate the 
mesh in one step unless you want to add "deformations" that depend on 
other points in the mesh (you haven't described anything like this, only 
using image data to deform the mesh). You've been pointed to the height 
field macros as an example and starting point.

I think you need to decide what you want, it will make answering you 
much less frustrating.

-- 
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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