In article <3a539535@news.povray.org>, "Alan Holding" 
<man### [at] lineonenet> wrote:

> This right?  Only asking because it seems to go against what's said 
> in the help file: 'Most of the color patterns do not use abrupt color 
> changes of just two or three colors like those in the brick, checker 
> or hexagon patterns. They instead use smooth transitions of many 
> colors that gradually change from one point to the next.'

Color maps are linearly interpolated. And that does qualify as a "smooth 
transition", it is referring to the fact that colors are blended 
smoothly from one to the other instead of being bands of solid color, 
not to the change between blends.
I have often wondered whether it would be useful to have different 
spline types for color_maps, or to allow splines to be used as color 
maps(the xyz values would be taken as rgb values), but I never saw any 
real use for it...this is one I had missed.
One of the patches I have written should work for this specific problem, 
though: the "spline_wave" patch. It lets you specify (with a spline) the 
exact mapping the pattern goes through before evaluating the color_map, 
in other words, giving a custom waveform to the pattern...in this case 
you would use a single black-white gradient and adjust the spline_wave 
to get what you want. I don't know if it will make it into MegaPOV 0.6b, 
though.

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

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