Brent Fraser wrote:
>   I'm new to Pov-Ray so I'm still trying to get up to speed on the design
>   philosophy.  My understanding so far: the Pov files describe a scene
>   containing objects with properties and a viewpoint (camera).  Some
>   properties change over time, driven by Pov's CLOCK variable.  Since the
>   properties are complex (can interact, etc) the scene needs to be
>   reconstructed (object properties re-calculated, possibly including the
>   camera postiion/orientation) for each frame (tick of the clock), and
>   this is done by re-parsing.  I get that; what I don't get is having to
>   re-read height_field and image_map files (non-changing raster files) on
>   every frame render.

Because POV-Ray has no idea if the images will change between frames. Or if
you use "image"+frame_number+".png". Absolutely no information is kept in
memory from one frame to another, except for the fairly-new clockless
animation feature.

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