On Mon, 16 Aug 1999 08:55:44 -0400, Greg M. Johnson wrote:
>Doctor, give me the news. Do these data provide any hints at making a
>small tweak to povray 3.1h to fix this animation slowdown without a
>total rewrite from scratch? Is it making some BS calculation in the
>first frame that uses up gobs of memory and is not really needed?  The
>problem is in the first frame, it seems.   Apologies if this is a dumb
>question.  Povray is the only language I'm fluent at; I know more about
>chip attach and substrate ceramic materials science than I do about how
>computers "actually work."

There was a discussion in c.g.r.r. about this a few months ago.  The 
consensus in that case was that if you start with an empty frame and
build up to frames with many, many objects, POV gets confused when it
determines its bounding parameters (By default, automatic bounding is 
disabled when you have fewer than 25 items in the frame.  It has been
determined empirically that this means fewer than 25 items in the FIRST
frame.)  One way to override this is to put +MB0 on the command line
or in the render options dialog.

However, you say you have 100 elements in the first frame, so this may
not apply.  There may be other parameters that are set the same way,
however.  One way to check is to add a thousand or so invisible objects
(out of view of the camera, and well-bounded) to the first frame and see 
if it changes the nature of the problem.  If it does, compare the render
statistics for the frame with and without the invisible objects and see
if you can find out what's making the difference.

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