John VanSickle wrote:
> 
> My current IRTC project has several characters made from unions of bezier
> patches.  I used a utility to convert the beziers to meshes, thereby saving
> about 4.5 megs or RAM for each character.  However, since POV-Ray converts
> bicubic patches into smoothed triangles internally, it should be a simple matter
> to include them in a mesh, and gain the memory-saving benefits of the latter.
snip
> And then the object HipBone could be used to build the thousand-man
> skeleton army, without sending the memory usage through the roof,
> as would be the case if HipBone were a union instead of a mesh.
> 
> POV Patch gurus:  Does this sound as easy to you as it does to me?
> 
> Comments?

   I am curious as to whether it is already implemented internally. The
reason I say this is I have done a lot of experimenting with multiple
copies of the same height field which too is simply an internally generated
mesh of triangles. The memory requirements for multiple HF's seems minor
compared to the use of say multiple copies of a union of triangles leading
me to believe HF objects already have the benefit of the advanced memory
caching scheme used in the mesh object.

-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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