Hi Roland,
I peaked at the LDView code (and Travis gave me some hints) but I won't spoil the mystery for you. :-)
I will add that it would be nice to have a semi-official smoothing algorithm; the flip side of smoothing is that if several programs implement smoothing, an author might want to modify a part to get high quality visual output; if we all pick different smoothing heuristics, it won't be possible to make the library look good everywhere.
To that end, I think it wouldn't be crazy to declare that smoothing _requires_ that lines and triangles share vertices in order for the line to create a 'crease' - it would seriously lower the computational work required to calculate the smoothed normals because you could rely on a bitwise index of vertex coordinates; without that you have to do a geometry test and at best use a spatial index - a lot more work for the CPU and developer.
If there were some official-ish policy on smoothing, we could code something manageable and authors could make parts work if desired.
Cheers
Ben
I peaked at the LDView code (and Travis gave me some hints) but I won't spoil the mystery for you. :-)
I will add that it would be nice to have a semi-official smoothing algorithm; the flip side of smoothing is that if several programs implement smoothing, an author might want to modify a part to get high quality visual output; if we all pick different smoothing heuristics, it won't be possible to make the library look good everywhere.
To that end, I think it wouldn't be crazy to declare that smoothing _requires_ that lines and triangles share vertices in order for the line to create a 'crease' - it would seriously lower the computational work required to calculate the smoothed normals because you could rely on a bitwise index of vertex coordinates; without that you have to do a geometry test and at best use a spatial index - a lot more work for the CPU and developer.
If there were some official-ish policy on smoothing, we could code something manageable and authors could make parts work if desired.
Cheers
Ben