William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

> I ran into considerable confusion back when I was playing with the
> peeling paint isosurface stuff and trying to come up with ways to
> implement the method on the fly. I was trying something similar to what
> you are trying with the color channels.

Thanks for confirming what I suspected.
I'll just have to figure out a way to code the normal of an isosurface function
into another function.

> Aside: I think it probably makes sense for the block patterns to have
> default color maps. I cannot think of a good reason for continuous
> patterns to have defaults other than black to white. Is there, or was
> there one back in the early days of many gammas or something?

I think the block patterns should have scalar values, such that a black/white
color map will return shades of gray.  It's simpler, more consistent, and less
confusing.
You might consider having "default" or standard color maps for those patterns
that are pre-defined and easily available.

pigment {brick color_map{CM_brick_default}}

> New users should not be pulling colors out of colors
> inc. Those color definitions today correspond to no common standard that
> I can see.

I do because I'm lazy :D  but I do think that there are a lot of legacy code
snippets and practices that need to be re-examined.
I've been working on a few ideas to make POV-Ray more usable and flexible, and
might help code-up and debug scenes much faster.

Ping / email me if you're interested in the details.

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