In message <web.42dd1fe9e652faa392a4d1390@news.povray.org>, 
FractalMBrown <fractalmbrown_AT_QX_DOT_NET@?.?.invalid> writes
>I am attempting to render a 1600x1200 AA 0.3 version of a level 5 Menger
>Sponge. However, it will crash with a "POV-Ray for Windows has encountered
>an error" message after about two minutes, occasionally. And, when it does
>appear to parse correctly, there is no render window and the statistics say
>that the entire four minutes was spent on render time. I check the folder
>and find a 640x480 bitmap file, which is not what I wanted. It will also
>crash for me if I try 800x600 no AA. I run Windows XP Home with POV-Ray
>3.6.
>
Watching system monitor on my win98 machine was quite frightening! You 
do realise your scene contains 3.2 million cubes at level 5?
Each level uses 20 times as many objects as the previous, level 4 has 
160,000 and used 374 megabytes of ram.

3 suggestions come to mind, neither particularly helpful:

1) Stick to level 4

2) Upgrade to a 64 bit machine with gigs of ram

3) Most of the cubes will not be visible. Maybe they could be removed, 
but that could then affect the radiosity calculations.
I expect that to be a non-trivial exercise, and better suited to a 
recursive macro method of scene generation.

If you didn't want the gaps between the cubes I'd suggest starting with 
1 solid cube and cutting holes through it with a recursive macro (I like 
recursion!). That would scale by 9x the number of objects per level 
instead of 20.
-- 
Alex

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