Hi!

Just a little idea I've been playing with for a while,
how about having user defined functional textures. (Yeah,
I know the correct term is procedural textures). The syntax
and code for povray could be greatly simplified and the
functionality could be enchanced a lot with include files.
What I mean is:

texture {
  function <x,y,z> <direction> {
    reflectivity = noise3d(x,y,z);
    color = map dot-product(<x,y,z>,<direction>) {
      [0.0 rgb <1,1,0>]
      [1.0 rgb <0,1,1>]
    }    
    .....
  }
}  

My example have a messy syntax, but perhaps you get the
idea... this way you would get much more controll over the
textures and you could make some quite nice include files.
The function engine could either be borrowed from the 
isosurface patch, or a new functional language could be
written with a little more imperative touch...
What do you think? Is it worth the effort?
I have made a small raytracer in LISP to test the idea of
user defined textures (it's not *that* slow actually) and
think it could be quite usefull. 

/ Mathias Broxvall

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On Fri, 10 Apr 1998 21:03:58 +0200, mbr### [at] swipnetse (Mathias Broxvall)
wrote:

>The function engine could either be borrowed from the 
>isosurface patch, or a new functional language could be
>written with a little more imperative touch...
>What do you think? Is it worth the effort?

In what way do the functional textures that are already in the
Isosurface patch not meet your requirements?

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Ronald L. Parker wrote:

> On Fri, 10 Apr 1998 21:03:58 +0200, mbr### [at] swipnetse (Mathias Broxvall)
> wrote:
>
> >The function engine could either be borrowed from the
> >isosurface patch, or a new functional language could be
> >written with a little more imperative touch...
> >What do you think? Is it worth the effort?
>
> In what way do the functional textures that are already in the
> Isosurface patch not meet your requirements?

  Maybe he's thinking of precompiled procedural
textures? But even that is possible with the iso-patch
(I think). Should bring nice speed-up.

-Hans-

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Ronald L. Parker <par### [at] mailfwicom> wrote:

> In what way do the functional textures that are already in the
> Isosurface patch not meet your requirements?

Hmm, I didn't know of them... I should get some kind
of documentation for the IsoSurface patch. Sorry to 
bother you.

/ Mathias

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On Sat, 11 Apr 1998 22:56:01 +0200, mbr### [at] swipnetse (Mathias Broxvall)
wrote:

>Ronald L. Parker <par### [at] mailfwicom> wrote:
>
>> In what way do the functional textures that are already in the
>> Isosurface patch not meet your requirements?
>
>Hmm, I didn't know of them... I should get some kind
>of documentation for the IsoSurface patch. Sorry to 
>bother you.

No bother.  I found some better documentation of the isosurface patch
up a level in R.Suzuki's web page from the patch itself, with the
documentation for the POV2.2 version.  In fact, looking at the POV2.2
versions of patches has been good in general in my effort to document
the various patches I've included in the superpatch.

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