"Rahul" <nomail@nomail> wrote in message 
news:web.47dd8b8e72535d7259eba08c0@news.povray.org...
>
>> If you do it in OpenGL, and you want speed, you need to bother with
>> drawing only visible spheres, etc. yourself.
>
> Exactly! That's the part I wanted to avoid. So to put it better: I was
> interested if there was any command line tool that did hidden surface 
> removal
> etc. but not with the photo-realistic precision of povray (or ray tracers 
> in
> general)
>
> I really don't need light-sources, shades, textures etc. in my 
> intermediate
> renders. Although I do have them in the final povray raytraced output 
> which
> looks great!


Might I suggest you post an example POV file to povray.binaries.scene-files 
so we can all have a play and see if we can speed it up.

Where is the most time spent? In the parsing or the rendering? How long does 
the final render take, and how long do you want (would you accept) the 
intermediat renders to take?

My suggestions are:
    1)    Group logical blocks of spheres together in unions or merges to 
improve the bounding box detection
    2)    Don't put the whole texture in every sphere. #declare or #local 
the textures at the top and use texture{T_MyTexture} in each sphere.
    3)    Remove the textures (especially any reflection/refraction) in the 
intermediate renders. Thiscould be done my #declaring simple textures as per 
suggestion 2 or by surrounfing all texture{} blocks with a #if()#end block.
    4)    I would suggest writing your output to an INC file instead of 
rewriting the POV file each time you do a new molecule. That way you can 
preserve any changes in the POV file with only the geometry of the object 
changing.

Rarius

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