I recently made a texture which uses a single image file as an image_map and
a bump_map, roughly like this:

texture {
  pigment {
    image_map { png "a_large_image.png" }
  }

  normal {
    bump_map { png "a_large_image.png" }
  }
}


This material appears to use twice as much memory as the same texture with
either map removed (going by the after-render statistics for "Peak memory
usage" reported by POV). This also happens if you just declare two separate
pigments that use the same file as an image_map. Given the images I'm using
are >100MB uncompressed, this ends up being quite crippling.

Is there a way around this, preferably using the SDL? I'm looking into
image_pattern: can that help by eliminating unnecessary mentions of this
external image? I'd also like to know if this is "fixable" at the source
level, or if it's inherent to POVRay's design at the present time (or is
desirable or necessary for some reason), before I think of getting the
compiler out.

I've seen this on POVRay for Windows 3.5 and 3.6.1, and on MegaPOV 1.2
(windows version).

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