Personally, render time is not my major beef at this point in time.  You can
do things to render quickly and then merge all of your components together
for a final (or several final) renders.

I would like to see something that allowed me to define a heightfield as a
CSG, then using that as a target, create a function that given an X,Z
coordinate in the heightfield would return the Y value for that point.
This out of all the modifications that could be made to POV would be the
greatest improvement in my mind.

Imagine,all those people who have contributed grass renders... you take your
grass stalks and place them approriately on a gently rolling heightfield.
Every one of them is placed at the right height irregardless of the point on
the heightfield it is generated.

You could randomly place any object on a heightfield at exactly the correct
height without trial and error on every object.  For my specialty, cities
could be generated rolling across a heightfield with buildings placed
correctly in any position on that heightfield without fear of the dreaded
"floating-box" syndrome or the "melted-to-low" oops.

Memory usage is my second gripe.  With the present way in which POV uses
memory when parsing and generating the matrixes it uses to render, at around
120,000 objects, you are out of memory on a machine with 128megs of
memory.   You can push that envelope a bit and you start swapping heavily.
Depending on other resources on your machine, this can crash it since
Windows sucks as an operating system.  (This may not be the case on other
platforms).

Memory utilization may also be improved by generating some way where a
"view" crops out unseen objects so that they are not required for a
particular scene.  If based on the camera position and where you are
looking, get rid of all the objects that do not appear in that view.  This
should be an on/off feature since if you have a highly reflective surface in
your scene, you may be reflecting objects that come from behind and beyond
the view.  You want to retain those objects in order to get the proper
reflections.  However, if you have no reflections, why keep those objects
around wasting precious memory.

That's 3.

Next!
Regards,
Robert J Becraft
aka cas### [at] aolcom

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