polygon smoothing

[Andrew Glassner <glassner at parc.xerox.com>]

Hi!

I've written a utility that will take a .quad file intended
for use with geomview (nee Minneview), and add normals to
the vertices for smooth shading.  The polygons may be in
random sequence; the program will find the common vertices
and average the appropriate polygons.

The program features what I call "edge preservation": if 
two polygons are sufficiently non-flat, then they are not
averaged together at a common vertex.  Thus the tip of a
cone will can be left unsmoothed, while the vertices at 
its base are smoothed.  You turn on edge preservation with
the -e switch, which takes the smallest acceptable dot
product between a pair of polygons as an argument.

The smoothing code is a general-purpose package; the program
is a fairly short client.  It only takes ASCII files, but
it would be be pretty easy to extend to binary.

If any of this would be useful to you, I'd be happy to send
you the source for the package, the quad format client, or both.

-Andrew   (Andrew Glassner / glassner at parc.xerox.com)