Alex <pov### [at] lazysodorguk> wrote:
> In message <web.42dd1fe9e652faa392a4d1390@news.povray.org>,
> FractalMBrown <fractalmbrown_AT_QX_DOT_NET@?.?.invalid> writes
> >I am attempting to render a 1600x1200 AA 0.3 version of a level 5 Menger
> >Sponge. However, it will crash with a "POV-Ray for Windows has encountered
> >an error" message after about two minutes, occasionally. And, when it does
> >appear to parse correctly, there is no render window and the statistics say
> >that the entire four minutes was spent on render time. I check the folder
> >and find a 640x480 bitmap file, which is not what I wanted. It will also
> >crash for me if I try 800x600 no AA. I run Windows XP Home with POV-Ray
> >3.6.
> >
> Watching system monitor on my win98 machine was quite frightening! You
> do realise your scene contains 3.2 million cubes at level 5?
> Each level uses 20 times as many objects as the previous, level 4 has
> 160,000 and used 374 megabytes of ram.
>
> 3 suggestions come to mind, neither particularly helpful:
>
> 1) Stick to level 4
>
> 2) Upgrade to a 64 bit machine with gigs of ram
>
> 3) Most of the cubes will not be visible. Maybe they could be removed,
> but that could then affect the radiosity calculations.
> I expect that to be a non-trivial exercise, and better suited to a
> recursive macro method of scene generation.
>
> If you didn't want the gaps between the cubes I'd suggest starting with
> 1 solid cube and cutting holes through it with a recursive macro (I like
> recursion!). That would scale by 9x the number of objects per level
> instead of 20.
> --
> Alex


I have been able to create a solid Menger Sponge, merely by changing s1
through s5 all to 1.0. I could use a "Merge" command on the entire thing
after that. I realize the memory constraints on this, as I calculated the
memory usage of the cubes alone, totalling 781.25 megabytes for 3.2 million
cubes. Add radiosity and light calculations, and it jumps up
astronomically. At first I thought it was a 32 bit limit on POV-Ray, but
I've been told from both you and a friend of mine that it couldn't allocate
enough memory. I'll try merging them all into a solid cube and see what
happens *crosses fingers*

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