"Ari" <win### [at] yahoocomhk> wrote:

> By the way, the thread URL is
>
http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/thread/%3Cweb.4d97bab0dc7be259e5cacc00%40news.povray.org%3E/?mtop=36002
3


Aha.
That was a good read, and I'd say that some excellent info is contained therein
- especially the scene code and that last post.

Up to this point, I'd say that the focus has been on using a random placement as
the fundamental method by which to build the pile, however, a stepwise #while
loop that built the pile up in strata would be a different approach - with
different advantages and challenges.

I'd say that there's a whole world of interesting algorithmic material out there
that could be applied to this, and certainly the Graphics Gems series and some
of those Numerical Recipes type code examples might help.
You might want to take a look at things like Appolonian Gaskets, Steiner circles
and spheres, canal and channel surfaces, fractals, closest packing schemes and
crystallography, and Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations.

http://paulbourke.net/fractals/apollony/


The key at this point though, is to keep it simple and fast enough to get the
job done.  Don't "let the perfect be the enemy of the good." ;)

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