Here we go again. Not much variation in these rocks, sorry, I promise to post
something more interesting soon!

In the end I gave up using the isosurface approximation macro, it was producing
far too many sharp angles and the smoothing was suffering. So I wrote a quick
and dirty mesh approximator that just shoots rays in a spherical polar grid
from the center of the object. Obviously, if the object occludes its own centre
anywhere then this won't work properly, but I'm just after a basic rocky shape
so what the hell. This saves loads of parsing time and still looks pretty good
up close; a little less craggy than previous versions maybe.

So, this image rendered in 7 hours, a bit steep but the bushes and trees in
cahoots with the antialiasing were the main culprits (that's the nice thing
about MegaPOV, you can see exactly which pixels are slowing you down). The
boulder itself renders really quick, even with radiosity. I'm really happy with
the (relatively simple) bozo pigment on the rock, it hints at surface texture
that isn't there, even really close up (thanks to partial tests without
radiosity at 3000x3000).

The triangular gaps in the plant life are deliberate; that's where the buildings
will be.

njoy
Bill

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