"Paul Bourke" <pau### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Any ideas why this scene
>    https://paulbourke.net/transient/povray/
> crashes once "theradius" gets past a certain value, eg: 0.6. There are no
> coincident points, running version 3.7 on MacOS. Tonnes of RAM (192GB) and only
> a fraction is used.
> And more importantly, how to fix or get around it?

I would say that you're pushing up against certain hard-coded values in 3.7.
Also, people have made a very good (and non-obvious) point about the disc object
having an inside.

Although you could use cylinders, I used spheres, but I put them all inside a
blob {} statement to get a speed boost from the special bounding mechanism.

It takes maybe 15 sec to parse that huge inc file, and then FOR-EVER to try and
render it.
That's coming from the transmit values in your pigment map.
Setting all of those to 0 allows the scene to render in 45s on my machine.

The only other things I can think of to perhaps make the scene render faster and
with less memory usage, are to sort the disc/sphere/blobs by color (perhaps with
some rounding) so that you can use a single texture statement for each group of
similarly colored object, thereby saving memory.
Also, you could sort by distance from the camera, and only give the nearest
objects a transmit pigment, so you wouldn't have so many layers of transmit to
deal with, though perhaps setting max_trace_level to a lower value would
essentially accomplish the same task.

Pretty cool idea - and I hope to see the final animation once it's all working!

- BW

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