In article <3f11b45b$1@news.povray.org>,
 "Greg M. Johnson" <gregj;-)565### [at] aolcom> wrote:

> Okay Chris, so what's the likely biggest contributor to slow scenes?

It depends on the scene. With isocacti.pov, it's isosurfaces. That scene 
could be a lot faster with mesh or patch geometry. (Of course, since the 
purpose of the scene is to demo isosurfaces, that's not really an option)

For newdiffract.pov, it's photons. Making the geometry in that scene out 
of meshes or patches would most likely only slow it down further.

Meshes are mainly used in modellers for these reasons: it is trivial to 
do a high-speed, low quality render using wireframe or a scanline 
renderer. If you are doing a scanline final render, you have to convert 
it to triangles anyway. And using a mesh opens up the possibility of 
doing displacements and other manipulation that you can't easily do on 
primitives. And finally, most other modellers use meshes.

If you're modelling something like a test tube, it's a simple CSG of two 
spheres and two cylinders (and maybe a torus to round the rim). You 
aren't doing anything that needs meshes, and the shape will probably 
render more quickly as a CSG. But if you're doing something like a car 
body or human figure, a mesh is the best way to go.

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

Post a reply to this message