> Unless you are working with transparent walls that have
> intersecting/overlaping parts and you need to remove the internal faces,
> use union instead of merge. It's much faster. With an union, you only
> test for the components that occupy a given, limited, area. With a
> merge, you always have to test for every components.
>

I am using a union of boxes and prisms for all unclean joints.

> If you create all your walls with a corner aligned to a reference plane
> (one edge with a zero coordinate) and you rotate them to the desired
> orientation then translate to the desired location, it's easy to have
> them join cleanly.
>

Imagine a +45 degree slanted wall connected to a 0 degree one. This will result
in an unclean connection. The spaces around the connection has to be filled and
some parts cut off. This is the problem I was describing. Also, the dimensions
need to be extracted for automatic creation of clean 2D flat drawings that are
construction document-level quality. Maybe they can be combined with another
drawing (as references) after extraction from POV-Ray but I do not want them to
be brushed-up or cleaned.

> If you use triangle, they don't have an interior. You can't use them to
> remove something from something else. You can chop bits from it. You can
> definetly union them with anything.
> You can combine many triangles into a mesh, and it can have a definite
> interior, you just need to add an "inside" vector. That way, it can be
> used in CSG without any problem. If you have many walls all defined
> using the same mesh, the mesh will reside in memory only once and will
> be referenced as needed with some transformations. Meshes also render
> fast, but a box is one of the most effecient primitive regarding
> rendering speed.
>

I wish to keep away from triangles although I feel that I will use them in the
roof construction. I get a headache handling them... for now.

> When you mention "a lot of instances", you think of what order of
> magnitude? POV-Ray can easily handle 100000's, or even millions,
> individualy textured boxes in a single scene, plus 100's of different
> prisms.

A typically residential building (which is my focus for now) would probably use
a few hundred boxes. I am also modeling finishes as boxes because I need to
calculate construction cost, etc.

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