On 17 Jun 1998 01:25:26 +0200, bob### [at] casimirrezelenstfr (Roland Mas)
wrote:

>Roy Schulz <roy### [at] rcsurztu-dresdende> writes:
>
>> 1. In animations only things that change between frames should be
>> reparsed, i.e. the first parsing should recognize which changes will
>> occur later on (maybe by looking at the "count" variable).
>
>  Could be. I think it would just need to add a boolean field in the
>data structure. But I do not know whether it would or not significantly
>reduce the parsing time, nor whether it would increase significantly
>the paring time for still images.

You'd also have to save the location in the file where parsing begins,
and you'd have to keep a call graph of what include files were
included when.  Variables would have to be marked as clock-dependent
as well, which means you'd need to know every location where they can
be defined and under what conditions... It wouldn't be very easy.

>> 2. Better radiosity with multiple interreflections. At
>> http://www.lightscape.com are nice samples how it should look. (This is
>> no critics. I know that radiosity is only experimental in POV 3.0)

Stephen Horn claims to be working on a better radiosity model.  Until
then, I would like to see the bug that causes it to turn off radiosity
for all future renders when you cancel a render in POVWin fixed.

>> 3. Native support for L-Systems to create trees etc.

I think someone already has an .inc file that can do a pretty good job
of this, among other things.  I want to say it's one of Chris
Colefax's .inc files, but I'm not sure.

>> 4. A fast preview, so that even animations could be previewed in
>> real-time on fast machines. Maybe polygon-based like game rendering
>> engines.
>
>  Ah hah. Not possible. POV-Ray is a ray tracer, and as such has no idea
>of what a polygon is. For the preview, have you tried the -q option?

Precisely.  While most of the primitives could be translated to meshes
fairly well, some just can't.  Anything infinite or potentially
infinite (planes, polys, etc.) fits in this category.  To top that
off, you'll still have to parse the scene for each frame. Even a
simple scene like skyvase takes a second to parse on a PII-233.

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