> >> 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.

No, no, you're all wrong. Firstly, everything except infinite objects
can be approximated with triangle meshes using implicit surface
approxiamtion techniques (This is most commonly used to convert blobs
into triangle meshes), and infinite objects can be partially converted
based on which part of them the camera catches. The fact that Povray is
a raytracer doesn't mean that it *can't* generate polygon-based
renderings. This could be an alternative rendering mode just for
previews. This doesn't mean that this idea is any good though;
Converting all of the objects into triangle meshes will probably take
more time than it will save. Then again, maybe not, what do I know.

Guy

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