So I tried combining my trees into two big meshes, one for the leaves and one
for the branches.

This works, but I have to say that it is really quite ugly. The leaves are one
of three meshes but transformed differently. So when I roll out my leaves into
one big mesh I have to transform the triangles for each leaf and write them our
one by one. The file which contains my leaf mesh ends up being 841mb for an
average sized tree! Obviously I have some optimizing I can do, it takes POVRay
27 minutes just to parse the file, but it only takes up 545mb in memory once
parsed.

But I guess my real question is: Is there any way to do a hierarchical
instancing in POVray? So I can just declare my leaf mesh's and then say where
they are in the scene with-out having to combine them all into one big mesh? I
believe you guys have already said no but I just wanted to rephrase my question
to be sure.

Thanks
-Steve

Post a reply to this message