How Camp wrote:
> [...]
> 
> Forgive me for being dense, but in the second section I see that some shapes
> have much lower percentages than others.  This is a ... Bad Thing?  I
> naively envision my scene only testing (and succeeding with) rays it really
> 'needs' to calculate, so the better the percentages, the fewer 'wasted' rays
> were used?  Thus, the better the percentages, the more efficient my scene
> is?  If this is true, then I appear to be horribly inefficient with my
> Triangles.

This part of the statistics should be pretty self-explanatory if you 
know how a raytracer works.  It tells you how many intersection tests 
are done for each type of shape and how many of them hit the object. 
Therefore a 'simple higher percentage = better' is of course not true 
but a very low percentage indicates problems.  You are horribly 
inefficient with the triangles, the reason probably being you did not 
use a mesh (no mesh is listed in your statistics).

> The third category is even more puzzling.  Is this simply for my
> information, or can I somehow glean useful knowledge about whether my
> objects are calling Noise vs. DNoise, and which should be a better thing.
> [...]
> 

The noise/dnoise calls are the number of calls to the basic functions of 
procedural patterns.  These numbers will be high when you use 
complicated procedural textures or isosurfaces with noise based functions.

> The fourth section seems to make more sense to me.  If I have a lot of
> reflected/refracted rays, my scene will take longer to render.  What about
> shadow ray tests vs. success?  Again, just information, or can I use this to
> my advantage?

The shadow ray stats are a bit like the shape stats above.  If most of 
the visible scene is in shadow (in respect to the used light sources) 
most shadow ray tests will be successful.  When you use area lights high 
numbers also indicate they are taking a lot of time.

> I'm also puzzled by the Smallest and Largest memory allocation (the next
> section).  Er, call me obtuse, but if my largest memory allocation is 24KB,
> how can my peak memory used be 40MB?  Obviously I am woefully
> misinterpreting these values.  Blush.

24k is the largest unit of memory allocated as a single piece.  The 
total amount of memory used by the scene is ~40 MB.

Christoph

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