In article <3ea260f1@news.povray.org>,
 "Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:

> So, as you can see (if you managed to read on to here), if the scene
> complexity rises, ray-tracing gets more economical, even for things like
> triangle meshes.

Scanline rendering has some advantages though. For one, the entire scene 
doesn't have to exist at the same time: for example, the renderer could 
draw each blade of grass in a lawn as it is generated, instead of 
creating a mesh in RAM. Raytracing, being image-to-screen instead of 
world-to-screen, can't do this...at least not as efficiently. The blades 
of grass would have to be regenerated for every ray tested. A smart 
bounding scheme could greatly reduce the number of blades to generate 
and test, but it is still a huge amount of work.
When you require lots of geometry and realistic lighting, the situation 
is quite a bit different...there are many cases where this trick will 
just not work. For realism, you really can't get much better than a pure 
raytracer.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

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