In article <39A11AD5.5A347EF4@ida.utb.hb.se>, sa9### [at] idautbhbse 
wrote:

> I think this makes more sense, as an object always is created with 
> some parameters, and then translated/rotated various amounts. It 
> should thus be quite logical to collect info about an object my 
> reversing the creation process; think of it as setting the values at 
> creation and getting the same values at a later point.

You left out "matrix" and "scale" transforms.
What do you propose? Saving a certain group of points, so the 
orientation of the object could be obtained? Say, origin(which would be 
<0,0,0>), x, y, and z, which would be transformed with the object and 
retrievable later? This seems inefficient, why not just make the 
transform available, and transform vectors yourself?
Or do you want to add rotations and translations to member variables, so 
you can have the total rotation and translation applied to the object? 
How useful would this be?

I think you can do all you need by simply making the transformation 
matrix available to the user. If the user needs more, they can create a 
new object and override the rotate(), translate(), etc. methods 
themselves to do what they want.


> Btw, check the VPython pages that ingo found:
> 
> http://virtualphoton.pc.cc.cmu.edu/projects/visual/
> http://cil.andrew.cmu.edu/projects/visual/vpythonprog.htm
> 
> Not very far from POV-Script actually - except that it is object 
> oriented, of course.

This does look kind of interesting...especially this part: "We hope to 
have a Macintosh version by August 2000." :-)
However, it looks like it would be a pretty big adjustment from 
POV-Script. And it would need a bit of adjustment to fit with POV...it 
seems designed to do dynamic realtime animations, while POV does frames. 
And it looks like all objects are drawn, no matter what, I would prefer 
at least a draw() method so I can have objects which aren't drawn.
But it looks nice and efficient, just 12 lines...

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

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