There will probably be a memory usage advantage to texturing the group.
There may be a slight parse time advantage. I do not believe there should
be any render time advantage. (Unless your scene makes POV access memory
a hell of a lot, since RAM is slower than CPU. ;)

There is an important diference, however. If you texture the item itself
and copy it, they will be identically textured. Discerning and nitpicky
people tend to frown on that. If you texture as a group however, each
column will have its own little section of the texture. The best solution
would be to have a macro that creates a slightly randomized texture every
time you want a pillar, but don't worry about that kind of stuff yet. :O

Note that for pillars, which probably don't touch, the group method is
fine, but if you have something made out of smaller objects (like a wood
floor) you would not want to do that, as it would look like one giant
piece of wood! (Yeah, so I used to do that in my old scenes... hey, shut
up :)

--
David Fontaine  <dav### [at] faricynet>  ICQ 55354965
My raytracing gallery:  http://davidf.faricy.net/

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