Anthony D'Agostino wrote:

> That's an excellent teqnique to save RAM. And the on-and-off effect is very 
> neat, even thought it isn't intended.

It's intended as a demonstration of what's going on, and how the memory 
savings work.  For a final rendering, I'd set the zoom value for 
clipping to the same value as the zoom value for the camera; when I do 
that, the clipping takes place entirely off-camera, and is not seen in 
the final frames.

I used a similar technique in the Sports round of the IRTC.  I modeled a 
stadium full of robots, which took far more memory than I have installed 
on my machine; a simple bit of code allows me to check for robots that 
are entirely off-screen (bounding sphere versus viewing frustrum), and 
when that happened that robot wasn't parsed.  This reduced memory 
requirements by ninety percent.

The main weakness of the technique is that if there is a reflective 
surface, the reflection in that surface may show objects blinking into 
and out of existence.  For a small, curved reflective surface, this is 
not a problem, but for a flat or gently curved large surface, the 
blinking may be too painfully obvious.

Regards,
John

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