Hi,

This is my first post here, I'm glad to have finally gotten through..
I guess there were news server problems here the past few days.

I'm trying to design some nice pie charts, but I'm at a loss as to the
best way to approach it. Cylnders and CSG's with planes come to mind (one
cylnder and two planes per pie splice), but I'd also like to add a smooth
edge to them so I was thinking something along the lines of a lathe or sor
for each slice. Now I'm not sure if you can specify a certain degree for
the sor object, but if so I think it would be ideal -- a couple points to
describe the smooth edges and then sweep it out the correct radians/degree
and your set, no CSG and unnecessary objects to get in the way. I will be
rendering with pvmpovray and as such I'm looking to reduce the rendering
time as much as possible, thats why I'm trying to think this through from
the start.

Checking the online html docs, I found the prism object looked
interesting.  Could this be used to generate each pie slice and give a
better look?  Another reason to have each slice independent is so that the
biggest piece could be pulled out a bit for added effect, or the other
pieces could be lower in height incrementally.. different colors/textures
and so on. The prism would give a smooth edge all around and make each pie
slice more distinct, where as the sor I described above would only have
the smoothness on the outside edge.

For those curious, I will be using this for disk space usage statistics,
but as you can imagine it has many other uses, with labels embedded, etc,
using the font capabilities of povray. Any type of data could be fed to
it.

Is there already something like this available, or 3D pie chart examples
etc? I think the prism idea would come out the best but I'll have to
think about the geometry to figure that one out. If anyone has any
suggestions I'd appreciate it.

- lv

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