In article <Xns9465AF0B848F7cybermans.pov.posts.@204.213.191.226>,
 "Stephen R. Phillips" <cyb### [at] socketnet> wrote:

> I have a scene I have been working on and there are a large number of light 
> sources in it, This appears to be a real problem. Is there a way to 
> 'eliminate' extra sources that won't be visiable using the fade_distance 
> and fade_power from the light source? (sort of like fog only for  light 
> source 'consideration')

No, though this probably should be added...


> Another question is, this scene is ment to be in a dark place with lots of 
> 'torches' 'braziers' giving illumination throughout the scene.  Is it 
> possible to use 'black' fog to fade parts of the scene 'unseen' etc?

Why don't you try it?
Yes, it's possible. The fog won't be illuminated by the lights 
though...for that, you need media.


> I automatically generate the light sources with the columns. The braziers 
> are seperate objects from the light sources. For objects greater than a 
> certain distance I assume these details are not visable including the light 
> source (see fade settings above). So is this the right way to handle this? 
> Do a 'distance' calculation, from the camera to the light source/object. If 
> it's greater than XXX don't create them. I'm thinking of doing the same 
> with the columns (I have 15000 of those in the scene I'm still tweaking 
> that to be honest.)

So you have N*15000 light sources, with N lights per column? You aren't 
very clear about this. If so, you are likely getting hammered by the 
light buffers. The light buffers are actually an optimization feature, 
but can really slow things down on scenes with many light sources. This 
many light sources are going to be slow whatever you do, though.


> Only with the columns I plan on switching to a cylinder 
> or a prism to simplify the look. Columns are made up of 10 sections that 
> are CSG made. Thus they are quite complex and the result object IMHO is a 
> waste of data space and likely tracing time.

If the columns are complex and identical, you might want to consider 
using meshes.


> My problem at the moment is I have some 'glowing' crystals of which there 
> are 40 some, no light sources on the columns and a parallel area light. It 
> seems that puting the light sources in the crystals slows things down 
> immensly. Thoughts?

For a glowing crystal, you might have better luck with emitting media 
and radiosity. The same may go for the column lights...radiosity can 
handle huge numbers of lights with no trouble. A room lit with 10000 
ambient spheres using radiosity will render a lot faster than a room 
with 10000 point light sources. It doesn't do well with small light 
sources though.

-- 
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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