Ken wrote:
> 
> Remco de Korte wrote:
> >
> > John VanSickle has made an excellent suite to smoothen meshes. This
> is
> > nice but I wondered: wouldn't it be possible to incorporate this in
> the
> > POV engine itself? With a heightfield you can add the "smooth"
> keyword
> > and for meshes you can have smoothe triangles but I think it would
> be
> > really great if you could have a recursive smoothe like in John's
> > suit(e) ;) For that you would have to have another way to define a
> mesh.
> > The advantage of this would probably mainly be speed but also an
> easier
> > way to model all sorts of stuff (as John demonstrated with the tree
> > branche picture posted last week).
> > Is this a stupid idea?
> >
> > Remco
> 
> I would say that it is not a bad idea. I have several sites listed
> in the links collection that talk about subdivision surfaces and a
> couple offers some fairly fast algorithms for this type of process.
> There will be an obvious perfomance difference over John's utility
> but it will still be a costly process especialy with high polygon
> counts.
> 
> --
> Ken Tyler -  1300+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing
> Links:
> http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html
> http://www.povray.org/links/

There is an other advantage: memory. Subdividing a mesh with a POV-macro
results in a large amount of triangles which need a lot of memory. The
amount of memory needed gets ugly very quickly. With a different way of
allocating memory (as it is now a triangle takes far more memory then I
think is needed) you'll be able to use a deeper recursion level. 

Remco

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