David Curtis <spa### [at] junkmailcom> wrote:
: I've just read from the docs that POV converts the bicubic patch into
: triangles. My question is why? It seems obvious that it must have something
: to do with
: computation time, and the fact that there is no great advantage to spending
: the time calculating a intersection point for every ray. Does that sound
: right?

  Well, the documentation says:

"The keyword type is followed by a float Patch_Type which currently
must be either 0 or 1. For type 0 only the control points are retained
within POV-Ray. This means that a minimal amount of memory is needed
but POV-Ray will need to perform many extra calculations when trying
to render the patch. Type 1 preprocesses the patch into many
subpatches. This results in a significant speedup in rendering at the
cost of memory."

  I understand this to mean that the patch is not converted to triangles if
it's of type 0 (at least at parse time).

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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