Another useful POV-Tree feature could be ability to apply
to the tree such effects as wind and gravity. I'm planning
to implement that as two sliders in preview panel. A
horizontal slider could represent a wind and a vertical
one could represent a gravity.

As far as I understand this falls into particle systems
category of CG. Does anybody have a good reference to
this subject (preferably on-line?

POV-Tree uses the same algorithm as TOMTREE to generate
tree model. The whole tree is represented in POV-Tree as
an array of Blob objects. Blob object in turn has three
attributes:

blob center - x, y, z coordinates
blob radius
blob strength (not used)

Should I add more attribute(s) to the Blob object to
participate in particle algorithm? Maybe index of
that Blob object in the array would be enough (?)

And here is a pretty Java applet demonstrating loosely
coupled particles which I think I have to implement:

http://v3ga.free.fr/Java/SodaTry/index.htm

Thanks in advance!

Gena.

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Gena <gen### [at] yahoocom> wrote in news:4084a443$1@news.povray.org:

> Another useful POV-Tree feature could be ability to apply
> to the tree such effects as wind and gravity. I'm planning
> to implement that as two sliders in preview panel. A
> horizontal slider could represent a wind and a vertical
> one could represent a gravity.

AFAIK this sounds more like physical simulation of soft bodies.
One way to model soft bodies is with an "armature" composed of particles 
connected by springs (sometimes called mass-spring systems), those system 
are particularly suited for clothes simulation systems.
I believe that Cristoph Hormann's MechSim is a good example of what such a 
system looks like.
SimPOV at http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~y0013390/simpov/index.html.
MegaPOV at http://megapov.inetart.net/

> As far as I understand this falls into particle systems
> category of CG. Does anybody have a good reference to
> this subject (preferably on-line?

See above.

--
Alessandro Falappa

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