You know what would be great(mathematically, anyway)?
Being able to define anything with functions; it is possible, and it's
very elegant 8)
The only problem would be speed 8(

Oh, and btw,  to all tutorial writer for iso-comething, i think that
saying that abs gives you the absolute value of something, etc, would be
better than just describing the effect(same goes for & with means AND,
and | which means OR)
PS, are all the booleans logic ops supported in the functions?(would be
nice to apply XOR or NOT or NAND to some figures 8), 
--
AKA paul_virak_khuong at yahoo.com, pkhuong at deja.com, pkhuong at
crosswinds.net and pkhuong at technologist.com(list not complete)...

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In article <390376B6.50042A6C@videotron.ca>, pk <thi### [at] videotronca> 
wrote:

> You know what would be great(mathematically, anyway)?
> Being able to define anything with functions; it is possible, and it's
> very elegant 8)
> The only problem would be speed 8(

You mean things like specular amount and roughness, reflection amount, 
ambient and diffuse, normal height(well, this last one is sort of 
possible, just use a function pattern as the normal)?
I have also thought of this, and speed wouldn't be the only problem. You 
would also have to store all those functions somewhere, memory usage 
would go way up.


> Oh, and btw,  to all tutorial writer for iso-comething, i think that
> saying that abs gives you the absolute value of something, etc, would be
> better than just describing the effect(same goes for & with means AND,
> and | which means OR)

The tutorials I have seen go more for the artistic side, rather than the 
math. I have started a tutorial that focuses more on the math and 
syntax, but it isn't very complete.
Also, nearly all of those functions are fully described in the official 
POV-Ray manual, they are identical to the ones outside isosurface 
functions. Only a few, such as noise3d() and if(), are not in the 
official version.


> PS, are all the booleans logic ops supported in the functions?(would be
> nice to apply XOR or NOT or NAND to some figures 8), 

I think only | and & are supported. And of course, if a !(NOT) operator 
is added, all of those would be possible.

-- 
Christopher James Huff - Personal e-mail: chr### [at] yahoocom
TAG(Technical Assistance Group) e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
Personal Web page: http://chrishuff.dhs.org/
TAG Web page: http://tag.povray.org/

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Chris Huff <chr### [at] yahoocom> wrote...
> In article <390376B6.50042A6C@videotron.ca>, pk <thi### [at] videotronca>
> wrote:
>
> > You know what would be great(mathematically, anyway)?
> > Being able to define anything with functions; it is possible, and it's
> > very elegant 8)
> > The only problem would be speed 8(
>
> You mean things like specular amount and roughness, reflection amount,
> ambient and diffuse, normal height(well, this last one is sort of
> possible, just use a function pattern as the normal)?

You can almost do a finish_map (with a function pattern) if you use a
texture_map with textures that are identical except for their finishes.
Speed might be an issue, though, if your textures use reflection or
refraction, because POV will compute both textures separately and then
average the results together.

-Nathan

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