Am 19.02.2012 07:39, schrieb Anthony D. Baye:

> This is always going to be a problem with interpreted systems:  The macros don't
> have any way to observe the calculations that the backend performs, so they have
> to duplicate those calculations.  Not only does the program have to interpret
> the instructions to perform the calculations, it has to perform the calculations
> twice (or more than twice if you're calling several different macros)
>
> If the baking functions had observer access to the results of the relevant
> tracing calculations, the process would be much faster.

Not really. From the tracing calculations, all you would get would be a 
point cloud - and an incomplete one as well, because you wouldn't get 
any information about the back sides. Not to mention that the detail of 
the point cloud would depend on the image resolution. And you'd have to 
figure out yourself how to connect all those points to a mesh.

To convert POV-Ray objects to meshes (which is what you're essentially 
asking for), there are way faster - and more accurate - options for many 
of POV-Ray's primitives. A box, for instance, is a trivial thing to 
convert to a mesh right from its corner coordinates; a sphere could be 
converted by computing a geodome with the fitting radius; and CSG 
objects could be generated by performing operations on the mesh versions 
of their child objects, which will give you exact edges and crevices 
(limited only by the precision of the child meshes).

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