Hey folks.  A recent post by a new member has inspired me to finish up an
old project - a POV file for easy graphing of various z=f(x,y) type surface
functions.  I HOPE to wrap things up by this Sunday.  My question is:
According to the standard practices and protocols for this group, what is
the easiest/best way to post the different parts of my response?  Putting
the images in the "images" section, the render files in the "render files"
section and entering yet a third post explaining the whole thing with links
to the first two SEEMS like what is called for by the way the site is
arranged, but that also seems rather convoluted and scattered.  In the
absence of any better suggestions, I will probably just toss up a quick web
page of my own and link to the stuff there, but that seems like a second
rate solution as well. Am I missing something?  What do folks suggest?

Thanks in advance,
Mike

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Mike the Elder <zer### [at] wyanorg> wrote:
> Hey folks.  A recent post by a new member has inspired me to finish up an
> old project - a POV file for easy graphing of various z=f(x,y) type surface
> functions.

  No offence intended, but isn't that quite a trivial thing nowadays in
povray? I mean, you can write just something like:

heightfield
{ function 100,100 { <the f(x,y) function here> }
  smooth
  scale <appropriate scaling>
  translate <appropriate translate>
}

and there you are.

  Making an equivalent isosurface isn't much more difficult either (although
it may be slower and requires tuning the max_gradient; otoh it will not show
the artifacts smooth heightfields often do...)

> According to the standard practices and protocols for this group, what is
> the easiest/best way to post the different parts of my response?  Putting
> the images in the "images" section, the render files in the "render files"
> section and entering yet a third post explaining the whole thing with links
> to the first two SEEMS like what is called for by the way the site is
> arranged, but that also seems rather convoluted and scattered.

  I don't know about others, but personally if someone scatters a post
among three different groups I usually skip that post altogether. I'm
too lazy to try to find all the scattered pieces and try to see them
all toghether.

>  In the
> absence of any better suggestions, I will probably just toss up a quick web
> page of my own and link to the stuff there, but that seems like a second
> rate solution as well.

  Why would that be a second rate solution? IMO it's the best possible
solution. You can use html markup to create a nicely-formatted document
of your work, explaining things and showing example images.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Thanks to Warp for the reply.
I'll probably go with the personal web page option.
As for just using a height field, I'm hoping to give VB (the poster of the
question) and folks in simillar situations (new to POV-Ray and programming)
something which is easy to understand and adapt.  I'm also having a bit of
fun trying to see how far I can go in creating something that will
automatically handle camera setup based just on the functions and their
ranges.

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Mike the Elder <zer### [at] wyanorg> wrote:
> As for just using a height field, I'm hoping to give VB (the poster of the
> question) and folks in simillar situations (new to POV-Ray and programming)
> something which is easy to understand and adapt.

  By the way, I assume that you know these:

http://povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/468/#s02_07_12_01_01

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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