All,

I would REALLY like to see the blob feature expanded.  Currently it only 
supports spheres (point sources) and cylinders (line sources) as 
components... Surely it wouldn't be that difficult to add planes to the mix 
and possibly other primitives as well.  Thinking about it, it seems to me 
that isosurfaces would be a natural component of blobs.

Just my 2p worth

Rarius

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"Rarius" <rar### [at] rariuscouk> wrote in message 
news:4745543f$1@news.povray.org...
> All,
>
> I would REALLY like to see the blob feature expanded.  Currently it only 
> supports spheres (point sources) and cylinders (line sources) as 
> components... Surely it wouldn't be that difficult to add planes to the 
> mix and possibly other primitives as well.  Thinking about it, it seems to 
> me that isosurfaces would be a natural component of blobs.
>
> Just my 2p worth
>
> Rarius
>
I second that

-- 
-Nekar Xenos-

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"Rarius" <rar### [at] rariuscouk> wrote:
> All,
>
> I would REALLY like to see the blob feature expanded.  Currently it only
> supports spheres (point sources) and cylinders (line sources) as
> components... Surely it wouldn't be that difficult to add planes to the mix
> and possibly other primitives as well.  Thinking about it, it seems to me
> that isosurfaces would be a natural component of blobs.

I also enjoy modelling with blobs and it would be definitely useful to allow
boxes as blob components as well.  Unfortunately, I don't believe that is
possible.  Blobs, or metaballs, are specialized fast (and old) algorithms for
rendering organic-like surfaces composed of spheres.  The cylinder component in
povray's blob is just a column of spheres or so I heard.

The general-purpose method of generating any surface is isosurfaces.  Tough on
the math, but much more useful than blobs.  I just wish there was some syntatic
sugar to allow for simple geometric CSG in the specification of isofurfaces,
rather than just functions.  Yes, Christoph Hormann actually came up with a
handy and featureful IsoCSG lib:
http://www.imagico.de/pov/ic/index.html

(including more generic blob making)
but I wish it was syntax rather than macro calls....

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Rarius wrote:
> All,
> 
> I would REALLY like to see the blob feature expanded.  Currently it only 
> supports spheres (point sources) and cylinders (line sources) as 
> components... Surely it wouldn't be that difficult to add planes to the mix 
> and possibly other primitives as well.  Thinking about it, it seems to me 
> that isosurfaces would be a natural component of blobs.
> 
> Just my 2p worth
> 
> Rarius

Christopher Huff once made a version of POV which supported such a 
feature. Here's the link to the discussion:

http://news.povray.org/cjameshuff-11441F.16053826022005%40news.povray.org

It looks like all the subsequent links are broken.

I think that was the same patch I was supposed to write a tut about, but 
felt that the new blob was too 'broken' to use, so I opted to write 
about it when it was fixed. Needless to say (because the current 
Mega-POV has no 'blob2'), I didn't finish the tutorial.

Sam

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in news:4745543f$1@news.povray.org Rarius wrote:

> I would REALLY like to see the blob feature expanded. 
> 

There used to be a blob-modeller Softy3D that used only two or three blob-
types. sphere, possibly cylinder, and the nicest one, a spheresweep like 
blob. http://www.angelfire.com/magic2/toomy/Softy3-D.htm
Iirc in the past(around version 3.1) there has been a mention from the 
team's side to create a different 'structure' for blobs, more like mesh.


ingo

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