Wolfgang Thaller wrote:
> 
> [...]
> You're probably right concerning "trace", and I'm not sure if it is feasible
> at all to try to emulate POV-Ray's texture support using OpenGL.
> It's true that VOP will _never_ support the full POV-Ray language, but with
> a few well-placed #ifdef(__VOP__)s...

patterns can be used for more than just textures, user defined functions
would be not even half as interesting as they are without pattern/pigment
functions.

> 
> > Therefore i
> > think building a OpenGL render mode directly into Povray will probably be
> > a better approach.
> 
> However, the approach used in VOP also has some very clear advantages:
> When rendering animations, VOP can skip the parsing phase in most case.
> It can recalculate most expressions in the pov file from an intermediate
> representation that doesn't exit (and wouldn't be useful) in POV-Ray, thus
> saving _lots_ of time after the first frame. I have a simple animated scene
> that takes 70 seconds per frame to render in POV-Ray. I have to wait about 5
> seconds until VOP shows the first frame (thats 14 times as fast), but after
> that the animation runs at 28 frames per second (thats 1960 times as fast!).

I'm sure the parsing behavior of Povray will change in future versions,
megapov already contains some approaches for this (Persistence of
Variables, Persistence of Scenes), and even with current official Povray
small and efficient scenes can render very fast, up to 10-15 fps (the POV
parser is probably much faster than your one).

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, IsoWood include,                 
TransSkin and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/  
Last updated 21 Feb. 2002 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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