POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.newusers : Astronomical scale space scenery: floating-point precision problem? : Astronomical scale space scenery: floating-point precision problem? Server Time
29 Jul 2024 10:19:08 EDT (-0400)
  Astronomical scale space scenery: floating-point precision problem?  
From: screwtop
Date: 6 Mar 2006 19:40:00
Message: <web.440cd3ff38a1658e9f9718b50@news.povray.org>
I'm trying to construct some space scenery containing a few very large
objects (Sun, Earth, Moon), and a small number of space vessels (~200 m in
length).  I started out using a scale of 1 unit = 1 m, but found that large
objects in the scene disappeared - they simply weren't being rendered.  I
switched to 1 unit = 1e6 m, which I thought might be a good compromise,
which is better, but the image is very grainy when both large and small
objects are rendered in the same scene.  I think these effects must be due
to limits of floating-point precision (this is POV-Ray 3.6 on 32-bit
Windows XP).  Is there any kind of workaround for this?  I'd really like to
work to scale if possible.

Is the 64-bit version of POV-Ray likely to work better for this kind of
scenery? I am using an AMD64 system but currently have no 64-bit Windows
installation; IIRC, SSE/SSE2 has 128-bit FP registers.

Thanks in advance!


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