[ REQ 5573]: thanks for Geomview (and a question)

["Mark Phillips" <mbp>]

Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 17:23:48 -0700
From: bobl at cs.ubc.ca
To: register at geom
Subject: thanks for Geomview (and a question)

Although I'm still a bit of a novice at it, Geomview has been really helpful
in visualizing what's going on in the problem I'm examining for my doctoral
thesis in computer graphics.  I'm looking at problems of global
illumination, and recently I've been considering a new way to represent the
transport of light between two surfaces.  Geomview has let me view the
geometry of the situation and verify that my code is working correctly.
This is much better that staring at lots of numbers.  Thanks very much for
providing this tool.

I have come across one problem, however, which may reflect my
misunderstanding of the file formats.

I want certain parts of my geometric model to appear semitransparent, but
even though I use alpha values of about 0.25 in some of the face
descriptions of the OFF files, Geomview appears to ignore them.  I can set
transparency as a material property, but this then applies to all the
polygons in the scene, which is not what I want.

	- Bob Lewis
	  bobl at cs.ubc.ca