in news:3B16FE49.1CBB76AD@pacbell.net Ken wrote:

> I don't think it would be easy to isolate the generation requirements
> from the rendering requirements. 
 
 In case of the macro I'm working on that is no problem. The mesh can 
be written to file without parsing and rendering it. The amount of 
memory needed then is low.

> A lot of it would depend on how effecient your generation code is. 

 Slow, 7h for 500000 triangles.
 For a moment I considered to write it in another language, but the 
macro does 'on the fly' displacement mapping, using the POV's internal 
patterns. There is no way that an external program can interact with 
POV-Ray to get the required data (eval_pigment) from it :(

> You may consider dumping the generated mesh code to a file with
> the #write command and then parse  the generated file. 

 This is what I do, but the resulting file can still be too big to 
parse on my machine. That why I want to have a good estimation of the 
memory use of a mesh before generating it.

> Should save on a good portion of the memory requirements this way.

 The overhead for generating the mesh isn't very big.



Ingo

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