"Charles C" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Additional instances of meshes are supposed to be much cheaper than that of
> CSG.  I think another thing is to try to have a common texture applied to a
> union rather than individually instantiated.

I already did that. At first my scene used a recursive #macro that
created every object individually, complete with their own textures.
This sucked up a lot of memory, so I moved the common textures
into a #declare, which helped a bit. Then I replaced the leaf objects
with a #declare as well, since they were all the same. Then I
realized that all the sub-objects of a particular level were identical,
so instead of a macro, I used a simple while-loop to create the object
from bottom-up in an array, with subsequent array elements
referring to the previous ones. This drastically reduced parsing
time (from a few minutes to basically instantaneous). Memory
usage is also slightly reduced, but at the end of the parsing stage,
povray starts thrashing---I suspect this is when POV is actually
instantiating the object from the array.

Perhaps the only solution is to buy more memory. :-S  I was just
wondering if there are ways to, e.g., turn off bounding slabs and
such (I don't mind waiting longer for the render). Maybe this is
just not possible with 500MB RAM. :-P

Although, on second thoughts, the objects *are* all in one
gigantic CSG union ('cos I'm too lazy to calculate the position
and orientation of every single sub-object individually). I'll try
to individually place objects and see if that helps.

As for omitting unseen objects, most of the objects are seen,
unfortunately. It looks sorta like a 3D snowflake, with plenty
of gaps in between to see what's behind. 12^n is a very fast
growing number, though... maybe I'm just hoping for the
impossible.

Post a reply to this message