Hello all! I'm new here, I've been using POV-Ray for about a month now,
going through the tutorials that shipped with it. I have some background in
both modelling, and rendering. I went to college initially to be a drafter,
and worked with AutoCAD quite extensively. I started in R12, and used
AutoCAD through ACAD2000. I worked for an architectural design firm for
awhile, and when I was working there, I got to use a piece of software from
Autodesk called Lightscape. This was my first experience with
photorealistic rendering. I was hooked immediately. Lightscape's
raytrace/radiosity engine was leaps and bounds ahead of the internal
AutoCAD engine that I was used to working with (especially the flat shader
in R12). Anyhow, I switched career fields 4-1/2 years ago, and had kind of
forgotten about rendering. About a year ago I got myself a copy of
IntelliCAD 2001i for free (they were open sourcing it at the time).
IntelliCAD is a virtual clone of AutoCAD R14, except that the free version
had no built in rendering engine. Searching the net for an open source
renderer was kind of a disappointment. I couldn't find anything that output
the quality I had seen when I was using Lightscape. Well, I had found one.
It was called POV-Ray. The quality of renders rivalled that of the high end
renderers I had seen. The only problem was that I had to learn this "SDL"
so I put it by the wayside for awhile. About a month ago, I revisited the
copy I had downloaded, and decided to put my mind to becoming a
"raytracer". I downloaded v3.6 (WIN) and started chopping through the
tutorials. Once I got into it, I realized that it's not all that different
than AutoCAD.

That brings us to today:
I've pretty well completed the tutorials, and feel that I have a pretty good
grasp on the SDL (well, except that isosurfaces give me a headache, but I
imagine that happens to every new user that doesn't have some type of
advanced math degree). I'm working on designing a scene of my own (my first
large scale project with POV-Ray) and I'm trying to do it all with POV. I
know I won't learn the software adequately if I simply design in IntelliCAD
and render in POV-Ray. Anyhow, I've read a bit on here about POV-Ray
storing meshes in memory to speed up rendering (or maybe just parsing?)
time. I don't recall seeing that in the tutorial, but I may have missed it.
Do you just declare the mesh, then place multiple copies, or is it more
complicated than that?

Thanks in advance for your help. I'm sure I'll have lots more to ask down
the road.

Oh, and sorry to be so long winded, I'm like that sometimes. :)

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