In article <3d5001cd$1@news.povray.org>,
 "Patrick Dugan" <pat### [at] usnetcomcorpcom> wrote:

> Are there any utilities that convert a povray object to a povray mesh2?

No. You could probably use an unofficial version of POV that has Warp's 
patch to tessellate the object and write the mesh to a file, though. 
Someone else wrote a better tesselation patch, but I don't know if it 
has the mesh data access that Warp's patch does.


> I would assume that a mesh2 version of that object would render much faster
> than the "differenced" original version.  Are there such utilities and how
> hard would this be to accomplish? 

That might be a bad assumption. Boxes and spheres are pretty fast, a 
difference using them could easily be faster than an equivalent mesh.


>  If it really helps I would even prefer the entire scene get 
> converted to speed up the render.

It would be extremely difficult to write such a utility, it would have 
to parse the POV-Ray scene language and implement tessellation for all 
the POV-Ray shapes, then output a mesh version of the final scene. And 
then there would be problems with the automatic tesselation of some 
shapes, you would have to use a pretty high resolution. The resulting 
scene would take a huge amount of memory, and probably still have lots 
of visible artifacts from the triangles.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom>
POV-Ray TAG e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
TAG web site: http://tag.povray.org/

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