"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> It seems to me that, aside from some issues of speed and accuracy, there are
> largely "the same".
>
> If this is the case, then is there anything preventing the implementation of
> pseudo-Boolean operations like "soft minimum" or other variants, that provide a
> smoothing of the hard boundaries?
>
> http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/smin/smin.htm
>
> Smooth Union, Subtraction and Intersection - exact, bound, bound
> http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfunctions.htm
>
>
> That would seem to address most of what a lot of people have been requesting for
> quite some time with regard to rounded edges and "fillets".
>
>
http://news.povray.org/povray.general/thread/%3Cweb.57c1c5e4750b03f1a7cafab50%40news.povray.org%3E/?mtop=410897
>
> http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/thread/%3C418e6d4e@news.povray.org%3E/
>
> I've already implemented about 4 of these, and they seem to produce very nice
> transitions between shapes.   Still need to spend some time exploring some more
> experiments with these, but I'm wondering if some of these could be added in
> source code to manipulate primitives or more complex CSG objects, and -
>
> if it would be possible or advantageous in any way to add a user-defined
> pseudo-Boolean blending operation.  Simply because, having tried to do some very
> detailed and extensive work with isosurfaces, the manner in which the functions
> need to be constructed can be very cumbersome.  With "primitives", object
> modifiers such as translate rotate scale, etc are easy to add in before applying
> the Boolean operator.

This all seems to chasing the same objective as I was in my posting in 2016
http://www.john-greenwood.co.uk/PovRay/Rounded_Objects/Basics.html

I found creating shapes this way was still rather slow and since then started
experimenting with creating ordered meshs using Excel that can be deformed by
cunningly applied equations in Excel to create a prototype mesh2 object body
part that can be customised by further parameters in PovRay.

This work is on hold for now, I shall be 80 next year and have other projects,
so I would be delighted if anyone picked up on any of the stuff I have done
since I found PovRay in 2013 ie:

Rounded corners, Tweek Colours, Crowd.

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