That does surprise me. Just how slow is MAX? I regularly do POVRay renders
that take 20 - 100 hours for a single frame(I am talking about 1025x768
AA=0.001, 10,000+ objects), does MAX take that long? How do people do the
neat animations in a realistic time?

Regards
Gordon

Lance Birch wrote in message <36fea482.0@news.povray.org>...
>Hmm, that's interesting, cause I've always found it faster... in both
>modelling and rendering.  Just going back to the point before though, I
>understand that inherently MAX is faster because it is a scan-line
renderer,
>but you also have to remember that MAX has adaptive degredation, so no
>matter how far you zoom in it will compensate by interpolating the faces
and
>recalculating the object.  This is especially useful in NURBS modelling
(for
>obvious reasons).
>
>MAX can also do raytracing though, it just uses the scan-line renderer, but
>when it calls the texturing function, that's where the raytracing is done
>(and it is very accurate BTW, it can do a lot of really cool things too,
>like reflective defusion, distance bluring, flurescence etc).
>
>Most of the time I'm modelling with NURBS, where it is impossible to have a
>real primitive.  Personally of course I like the idea of real primitives
>because they are accurate and allow easy booleaning.
>
>BUT!  Back to the question at hand of course (LOL, "you know you've been
>raytracing too long when you get in a flame war over rendering programs..."
>he he he)
>
>It still, if you didn't want to do it the mesh way that is, should be
>possible to incorporate this feature into POV-Ray.  I know the Isosurface
>patch can do it with its bump mapping (as in, formula based displacement),
>so surely if you created a few new mapping types and created a displacement
>function based on the intensity of an image it should be possible... Of
>course there's no way I could do it, I'm not a brilliant programmer like
all
>the poeple on the POV-Team :-)
>
>Back to the mesh idea though, as long as the function was well written
there
>shouldn't be problems with surface normals...  I don't think that it would
>be too hard (given a person that is a good programmer) to create a function
>that would auto-interpolate an object to the correct amount...  Of course
>this kind of advanced macroing would require some extra keywords to be
built
>into POV-Ray, such as object intersection, etc etc etc.
>
>Anyway, just a thought... Also, isn't there an external program which can
do
>this?  I can't remember the name of it... and it's only to meshes of
>course...
>
>--
>Lance.
>
>BTW, anyway how wants to see what MAX can do, go to
>www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/parallax/359/maxgallery.html
>
>---
>For the latest 3D Studio MAX plug-ins, images and much more, go to:
>The Zone - http://come.to/the.zone
>
>

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