On 29 Oct 1998 11:05:34 -0500, Nieminen Mika <war### [at] assaricctutfi> wrote:
>Jon Berndt <jsb### [at] hal-pcorg> wrote:
>: Is it possible to wrap a height field around an object?
>
>  I think this would be a nice feature for the next version of povray. It
>shouldn't be hard to implement (heightfields are converted to a triangle mesh
>anyways; just change the way in which it places the triangles (not on a
>plane surface with a height but on a spherical surface with a radius) and
>there is it).

Actually, heightfields are a very specialized triangle mesh, with the 
intersection-finding routines optimized to a gridded, rectangular, 
nonoverlapping mesh.  While you could create a mesh, you'd end up with 
the same thing you can get from orbcyl today.  On the other hand, it 
would be possible to create an optimized search routine for spherical 
or cylindrical heightfields as well, so maybe someone will do so 
someday.

Followups to povray.programming.

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