Thanks, fellows, for your helpful advice.  I've created a triangle mesh out of
the whole affair, and it consists of 50,000 triangles in total.  Is that an
exceptionally large number of triangles for a mesh, or is that a reasonable
amount?  I realize it's a vague question, but I'm just trying to get a sense of
what's "normally" done for projects of this type.

Thanks, GB

Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> Alain <aze### [at] qwertyorg> wrote:
> > You can have one mesh per face, each with it's own image_map. You then
> > combine the various faces toggether using an union.
>
>   That would be really inefficient and wouldn't benefit from mesh
> optimizations at all.
>
> > You can also combine the various views into a single image and, using UV
> > maping, have that image wrap around a single mesh.
>
>   There's no need to do that.
>
> > You can also have a single mesh and apply different images to different
> > areas.
>
>   Honestly, I can't understand why that wasn't your *only* suggestion,
> because the other ones don't make too much sense.
>
>   Meshes have an efficient way of using predefined textures in individual
> triangles or even individual vertices, so that's obviously the best way of
> doing that.
>
> --
>                                                           - Warp

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