Warp wrote:
>   How about simply enclosing those light sources inside #if blocks?
> If the camera is outside, don't create the inside light sources at all.

That's what I essentially wound up doing. I have my own macro preprocessor 
(instead of using SDL).  I was hoping to be able to (for example) describe 
the shape of the outside walls once and reuse it on every floor, but POV's 
bounding boxes aren't magically clever.  Then I realized if I have a 
five-story building with 50 light bulbs on each floor, I'll be dead before 
it renders, so I essentially put in my own version of "light groups" to 
simply not expand the lights in the macro expansions unless the camera was 
in "the same room", but it's all manual at the moment. I was hoping I could 
have basically one expansion of the macro work for all the different traces. 
(I take dozens of traces of each room and make a walk-thru. I had to put 
closed doors between the rooms so I could turn off lights in a way that kept 
  you from seeing they're off.)

I was just wondering if it was worth modifying my macros to allow lights in 
lightgroups, or whether leaving it as "the camera and light are in the same 
room so include the light" bit is the best I can do. (Which implies 
re-expanding the macros for each room, which takes several minutes because 
the macro expander is not written with efficiency in mind.)

Honestly, it was at least as much curiosity as practicality. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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