In article <200### [at] dh286pemcamacuk>,
 Daniel Hulme <pho### [at] isticorg> wrote:

> > yet. But that's another one - fur implies tens or hundreds of
> > thousands of objects, and the more RAM you have, the better and more
> > fur you can render. I suspect!
> Assuming you use geometric fur. If you treat fur not as objects but as a
> volumetric thing, you can do it with O(1) memory usage.

Depends on the way you do the volumetrics. You could do it with constant 
memory storage, procedurally based on the object data. Another way uses 
voxel fields, which has memory requirements linear with the volume of 
the fur. You get a tradeoff between memory, time, and quality, as with 
many other things.


> This post is an advert for my final-year project, which is to patch
> POV-Ray to provide fur support (going far beyond what is in the patch
> currently in MegaPOV). See my posts in povray.programming, and watch
> this space!

I haven't looked at your patch yet...have you done any work with 
volumetric long hair? I've achieved some very nice effects with 
model-to-screen techniques, basically drawing lots of antialiased lines 
(the advantage being that you can store a single path and generate 
thousands of hairs from it during rendering), but this has obvious 
problems with reflected or refracted rays. I've been thinking about 
various ways to integrate it into a raytracing engine, including using 
variations of sprites and volumetric methods for reflected or refracted 
rays.

-- 
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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