Dear DXplorers,
I am on the verge of giving up on ever fixing a buggy surface rendering of
my artificial-heart pump chamber, but maybe someone can give me an angle I
haven't tried yet.
I generated a set of ~1-mm-spaced nodes to describe the surface, then
formed triangular connections between them. The two programs that did these
were buggy, BFI approaches that required some manual editing of their
output. The output went into a DX native file that produces a ~99% perfect
result.
Unfortunately, the <1% that is not perfect consists of triangles that don't
render properly: they are far too light or dark compared to their neighbors
(and stand out like a dog's you-know-what's!).
I modified my software to ensure that each triangle is defined by 3
vertices that are sequenced anticlockwise (with respect to a convenient
central datum), but I don't think it works correctly at the joint between
the main pump housing and the inflow conduit (triangles around the joint
look like they were added on in a clumsy patchwork).
I have tried editing triads of vertices by hand (using {Pick} to identify
the culprits), and have observed many strange and wonderful results, including:
a) no change to the triangle (the most common result)
b) the triangle changes from too dark to too light
c) the triangle changes from too light to too dark
d) an adjacent, good triangle goes bad
e) a fraction of the triangle renders OK, leaving the rest of it
transparent (really weird!)
f) parts of the triangle render with different shades
I suppose I need to know the assumptions behind the algorithm used in
{Shade}, so that I can try to make my geometry conform to what it expects.
Is there some detailed documentation with the source code?
I can e-mail a .ps file to anyone who wishes; I don't think the Major lets
me attach it for e-mails to the List.
Regards,
Allen H. Nugent
Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052 Australia
Tel: +61 2 9385 3916 Fax: +61 2 9663 2108
