Ray Gardener wrote:
> 
> > Concerning landscapes - i have seen and rendered far more complex
> > landscapes with POV-Ray than you usually see being made with scanline
> > renderers.  I really wonder if you could show me a landscape render you
> > could say 'this would not have been possible in POV-Ray because of the
> > detailed geometry'.
> 
> Fair enough. I submit the following picture:
> http://www.daylongraphics.com/products/leveller/tour/ss_scanline.jpg
> 
> It contains almost 17 million triangles. The rocky lumps
> in the foreground were drawn using a fractal cube geometry
> insertion. The rest of the ground is done using fractal
> displacement subdivision. There is no bumpmapping; every
> lighting effect is done with actual geometry.

In your sample the foreground shows not much more than pure noise - no way
to determine the exact geometry.  This noise could easily be done in
POV-Ray though.  The background seems easy to accomplish in POV-Ray as
well, at least similarly.  If you want exactly the same you would have to
implement the used function in POV-Ray.  The whole thing without shadows,
textures and other slow stuff - it is well possible that POV-Ray could
beat the 12 minutes on it.

17 million triangles would of course need quite some memory in POV-Ray as
a mesh but luckily there are other possibilities to generate geometry in
POV-Ray as well...

As an example - this scene was made in 1999 - at a time when most
landscape renders were commonly using no more than 1-2 million triangles:

http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~y0013390/pov/pict/iso_rock_01.jpg

Although this scene was never designed to render fast - in fact by nature
it was quite slow - it renders with plain texture, no aa and no shadows
within 7min44sec (640x480, Athlon 1GHz). Memory use 214k BTW.

http://www.schunter.etc.tu-bs.de/~chris/files/iso_rock_02b.png

The geometry is equivalent to far more than 17 million triangles, of
course you can't really see it at this size.

> [...]
> 
> I'm not worried about feature non-support
> as much as whether the renderer is available at all.
> The goal of supporting every primitive type,
> every option, etc. is laudable but I see it
> as something that can be grown towards.

You are free to implement such a thing but be warned: there will hardly
anyone be interested in a POV-Ray feature for scanline rendering that only
supports certain specific geometry definitions that are not compatible to
raytracing and therefore are not usable in a 'real' POV-Ray render.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 28 Feb. 2003 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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