After fooling around with isosurfaces for the first time a couple weeks ago,
I realized how much better they can be for making something look
realistically bumpy, as opposed to a normal pattern. (I know this is pretty
common knowledge, but I hadn't actually experimented with it myself until
then) However, the rendering speed is amazingly slow for some of them. I
think a single frame of one crystal formation (a sphere with crackle added
with a translucent texture containing some emitting media) took something
like 20 minutes to render. Is there any way to achieve this sort of effect
faster?

Moreover, I was curious about the internal processes behind isosurfaces and
why it sometimes takes so long to calculate them. I do know the general
thoery, but is there anywhere that I can find a more detailed account of how
the pov-ray does these things internally? I did download the source code,
but I havn't really had the time to have a good look at it yet (and given
the size of it, it's a bit of a task just to figure out where to begin as I
have little knowledge of the internal organization of the renderer)

I do program myself, so I'm sure that given enough time I could figure out
how it works, but I was just wondering if there is some place where the
internals are already explained a little, to give me a head start perhaps?

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