Margus Ramst <mar### [at] peakeduee> wrote:
: Correct me if I'm wrong, but is the fact that most POV primitives are
: mathematical and 'perfect', an advantage - and yet a weakness?

  Both.
  Advantages:
  - The primitives are perfect. You can zoom the primitive as
    big as you want, and the surface will always be perfect.
  - It doesn't consume memory. A mathematical sphere consumes a few bytes
    of memory, while a good sphere made with a polygon mesh consumes huge
    amounts of it (probably several kilobytes or more). You can have a million
    spheres (or other primitives) without running out of memory.
  - In many cases it's faster. For example, raytracing a sphere is extremely
    fast, while raytracing a big polygon mesh is rather slow.
  Disadvantages:
  - You mentioned some of them. Non-linear transformations are not easy to
    make, and they are quite slow in many cases. UV-mapping is hard to apply
    to a mathematical object, etc.

  In some cases it doesn't make sense to convert a primitive to a mesh (for
example with bounding objects).

-- 
                                                           - Warp. -

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