I used several sphere_sweeps in a recent IRTC entry, and yes, they
are rather slow to render. They are slow rendering creatures to
begin with but I initially felt there was a problem with
auto-bounding too. After recently reading some past problems others
had, I tried dropping the bounding threshold to 0 (my test cases
were all with one or two sweeps, so double duh to me), and
experienced results comparable to manual bounding of the same
object.

Still, if any given sweep extends across a significant portion of
your image, it'll be quite slow.  It's quite intensive calculating a
sphere swept along a multi-segmented spline. If you can simulate the
same effect by breaking it into multiple smaller sweeps each in its
own section of the image that might help somewhat (untested, but it's
an idea).

There was recently some mention of improved bounding for sphere_sweeps
(the words "heirarchal bounding" caught my attention), but that's an
unofficial patch that's being worked on. For the time being, just be
sure your sweeps are properly bounded and take up a second hobby.
Me, I'm teaching myself matrix math. :)


-- 
@C[$F];
The Silver Tome ::  http://www.silvertome.com
"You may sing to my cat if you like..."

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