"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> "Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:

> > I've also been working for months on various schemes to tesselate a typical
> > pre-made POV-ray object (to eventually turn it directly into an .stl file for
> > 3-D printing). I've solved *some* of the problems, but the overall solution
> > still eludes me :-\  I haven't given up though!
>
> "tesselate" --- More details please!  ;)
>

As in, taking any pre-made object and turning it into a triangle mesh surface--
even objects with holes, voids, undercuts, etc. So far, I have solved only 'step
A'-- finding regularly-spaced points on all the surfaces, without picking
redundant points. Even that's not quite perfect, though. The *bigger* problem is
how to logically connect those points to make triangles... which is the 'holy
grail' of the entire scheme, of course!

As alternatives:
I've looked at the old 'marching cubes' algorithm, but that does not seem to be
appropriate, as it deals with isosurfaces and look-up tables. I don't know
though.

There is also a 'pivoting ball' algorithm that looks more promising, although I
don't yet know how I would implement it in SDL.

Anyway, I didn't mean to hi-jack your post...

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