MichaelJF <fri### [at] t-onlinede> wrote:


> But I think, one has to meet a compromise between the number of balls
> and the possibilities to depict them. IMO, 13 generations is a good setting.

It's interesting that you're doing this with an include file!
How long does it take to parse the scene that writes the .inc file?
How much faster does it parse when reading the .inc and not calculating the
sphere parameters?
Would it go faster without writing to a file?
And you're right - at some point, the size of a sphere will be less than a pixel
- so why bother.

Now, in order to massively cut down on the number of actual spheres that you
need to use, I was wondering if you could somehow test for tangency with the
outer enclosing sphere and only render those spheres. (maybe 1 additional
layer...?)
It would take longer to parse, but then you could write a much smaller .inc.

You _might_ be able to test for tangency with the spheres that you subtract as
well, for the "cutaway" renders.


> Now that I had been working on the topic for a while, I recognised my
> reflection matrices in the code given by Esperanca, which I hadn't been
> able to do at first, and was able to convert his rules to POV.
>
> https://observablehq.com/@esperanc/3d-apollonian-sphere-packings

That looks familiar - I might have that in a pile of papers that I haven't
gotten to yet.  All of the IRL stuff has been exploding, to eat up the otherwise
free hours.

> > Maybe just honor one request - do one with iridescent bubbles.  :)
>
> Maybe, but this renders a while...
>
> global_settings { max_trace_level infinity }

Just an idea  ;)

Also another idea... (just to jot it down here)
All of the spheres tangent to the outer enclosing sphere could be
stereographically projected onto the plane...  :D

- BW

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