In article <cja### [at] netplexaussieorg> , 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>  wrote:

> Sounds like you're talking about something like this:
> http://www.cs.utah.edu/~bes/papers/height/paper.html
>
> There is a landscape example with the equivalent of 1,000,000,000,000
> triangles. And instead of generating and discarding millions (or
> billions) of unused microtriangles, it generates them as needed.

Ah, look, one billion triangles rendered in 43 hours* for 1080 Kpixels.
Scaling your previously reported result of 16.8 million triangles drawn in
12 minutes as 275 Kpixels, your scanline method would take over 47 hours.
And their scene render time includes global illumination and shadows.

    Thorsten


* Note that they give time in CPU hours, not actual runtime - they used a
shared-memory supercomputer, but each node is not faster than a desktop
processor at all.  So runtime is probably a few minutes.  BTW, all existing
scanline algorithms do have problems scaling well on supercomputers or
clusters when working on the same image.  This is not the case for ray
tracing...

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

Post a reply to this message