In article <3aa616a9@news.povray.org>, "Peter Cracknell" 
<pc### [at] lineonenet> wrote:

> Fair point, but when I picture subdivision in action I picture a modeller
> actually in control and view of a mesh which then gets 'subdivided', 
> POV-Ray could subdivide therefore, but in general the subdivision 
> will be of imported mesh's won't it anyway?  So yes it could be used, 
> just not as ideally as people would like.

I'm not sure I understand...subdivision would be used on meshes, height 
fields, and other mesh-based objects, and a lot of meshes are generated 
within scene files...and I don't see why it wouldn't be useful for 
imported meshes. You could get away with much smaller files, and get 
much lower RAM usage. (At the cost of some render time, though it could 
also be more efficient, by only subdividing triangles when necessary. 
And if you really want speed, you could subdivide the entire mesh before 
rendering.)
In fact, to get the best out of subdivision surfaces, you *have* to have 
it built into the renderer...there's no way around it.
Sure, you could also use a modeller, but then you are restricted to 
externally generated meshes, huge files, and high RAM requirements.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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