why not have someone export a cylinder as a mesh for you from a program
that can and then use it as an include file?  i think meshes parse
faster and take less memory for your situation.  you could still use
your program to place them, you would just have to put the object name
in place of the cylinder.

Simon Lemieux wrote:
> 
> >   Perhaps instead of doing it the hard way (ie. program your own raytracer,
> > which probably won't be any better than povray), you could just try to
> > optimize your scene for povray.
> >
> >   If povray spends ages calculating light buffers (and that's what is filling
> > up the memory), try turning them off. The rendering may be slower, but if
> > it was the actual problem, it will render, which is the goal. You can also
> > try with the vista buffers as well (although I don't know if it will be of
> > any help).
> >
> >   If your scene has many identical groups of cylinders (the only difference
> > between the groups being the transformations (scale, rotate, translate)
> > applied to them) you could try replacing the cylinders of one of these group
> > with equivalent smooth triangle meshes (making a #declared identifier of them).
> > When you make copies of this mesh (and transform the copies) they will take
> > a lot less memory. The bigger the group of cylinders and the more the copies
> > of the group, the better (ie. more memory saved).
> >
> >   If your texture doesn't have to be transformed with the cylinder (but is,
> > for example, just a plain color), don't texture each cylinder separately,
> > but make a union of all the cylinders in the scene and texture it just once.
> 
> IMHO,
>         POV-Ray is a complete general raytracing algorythm...  which will be fast
for
> almost anything...
> 
>         My scene has no light, nothing else than a few millions of cylinders all the
> same texture...  how can I optimize that for povray? Reduce the number of
> cylinders? Wrong!  That would also reduce the realism of my scene... what I need
> is a raytracer that would handle very easily and very fast such a big number of
> "Cylinder" and would be simply very slow when you would only have a cube...
> Optimized for a large number of cylinders, that is what I need!  Also that I got
> a C++ program that calculate the position for all these cylinders and outputs
> the result in a povray script...  ( cylinder { <x,y,z> texture { TheTex }})  and
> then povray starts Parsing the scene and takes forever...  Would take a double
> forever if I added lighting!...
> 
>         I am very interested in Povray, but sometimes I would need a specific
tool...
> 
> Thanks,
>         Simon
> 
> --
> +-------------------------+----------------------------------+
> | Simon Lemieux           |            http://www.666Mhz.net |
> | lem### [at] yahoocom  | POV-Ray, OpenGL, C++ and more... |
> +-------------------------+----------------------------------+

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