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.

The syntax would look something like this:

#declare HipBone = mesh {
  bicubic_patch { type 1 u_steps 3 v_steps 3
    P0,P1,P2,P3,
    P4,P5,P6,P7,
    P8,P9,PA,PB,
    PC,PD,PE,PF
  }
  bicubic_patch { type 1 u_steps 3 v_steps 3
   // more points here
  }

  // ten or more bicubic_patch objects here

}

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?

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