In article <3a9df7d9@news.povray.org>, "Nekar Xenos" 
<vir### [at] iconcoza> wrote:

> Why does it seem that normals don't really have any height.

Because they don't. They are called "normal modifiers" because they 
modify the surface normal, the direction that is perpendicular to the 
surface at each point. The lighting calculations then use this modified 
normal instead of the real one, resulting in fake shading effects that 
look like bumps and other surface features. The actual geometry of the 
surface is not affected.


> Is it possible to map a height-field onto a sphere in any way?

Not within POV. I remember seeing a program that took an image and 
created a mesh object for a spherical height field, but I don't remember 
what it was.
Actually, in MegaPOV, you could do a macro that accomplishes this...just 
use the eval_pattern() function with the image_pattern and generate a 
mesh.

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

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