Hi Tracers!

Playing around with seed() and rand(), I soon started to explore my
computer's limits of performance by programming scenes with several
hundred thousands of primitives... and I was badly surprised how few (!)
objects I can render! With 128 megs of RAM, 210.000 objects obviously
seems to be the end of the flagpole, now with 320 megs, the upper limit
should be around 525.000 or so - but instead, already at 480.000 objects
I get the message "Couldn't allocate XXXXXX bytes for building slab".

On the other hand, I often see scenes with several million (or even
several dozens of million) objects in this newsgroup, knowing they were
made on machines not excessively much larger then mine (for example,
even Mick Hazelgrove uses only about three times the RAM I own - and
nevertheless successfully renders scenes with 30 million grass leaves!),
so I begin to ask myself what I do wrong...

Is there any way (e. g. some special tracing options - I looked them up
the in Manual, but it doesn't talk about memory usage anywhere) to
optimize RAM usage?

Another question deals with the image attached here: how to do realistic
dunes? The large-scale structures of my dunes are already quite
satisfying (I used the "turbulence" function in Heightfield Lab to
generate the heightfield) - but how can I do the small ripples covering
the windward sides of the dunes? Obviously, neither ripples nor wave
normals do the trick...

And one last question: is there a way to make infinite heightfields
(like the isosurfaces in MegaPOV) in official PoV-Ray?

See you in Khyberspace -
http://www.geocities.com/electricafghan/index-e.html

Yadgar

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