cones inside a blob?

[Mariannne]

Hi everyone,

I am drawing an animal, so my whole shape is one single blob. Otherwise the transitions look too sharp. This unfortunately restricts the number of shapes I can use: AFAIK there are only cylinders and spheres. I tried a cone but got error messages.

I approximate blobed cones with successions of spheres very close together. A simple shape such as egg takes several. I cannot simply decrease the blobing value to make them link more strongly otherwise the spheres also bonds more strongly with nearby bits and pieces, which is not what I want.

With the default blobing value of 1, the maximum distance between two spheres is 0.25. If they are further apart, the object starts looking stripped. They all have to be manually adjusted in position and size.

There has got to be a better way. I thought about a "FOR" loop but I don't feel that confident in my coding abilities. I am not even sure that would be accepted inside a blob. Extra brackets seem to confuse it (or maybe I'm the confused one).

Any way, I tried translating a group of spheres and it didn't function. This is how I wrote it:

translate <20, 0, 0> { // Beginning of group of spheres having to be translated
sphere {
<2.2, 0.25, -2.5>, 0.5, 6.5
pigment {White}
}
sphere {
<1.9, 0.25, -2.2>, 0.5, 6.5
pigment {White}
}
} // End of group of spheres having to be translated

I wanted to avoid having to add a "translate" command to every sphere individually, because there are so many of them. But the above does not function, I have to do:

sphere {
<2.2, 0.25, -2.5>, 0.5, 6.5
pigment {White}
translate <20, 0, 0>
}
sphere {
<1.9, 0.25, -2.2>, 0.5, 6.5
pigment {White}
translate <20, 0, 0>
}

Please help