Hi tracers!

(excuse me for the large PNG file - but I thought JPG would have harmed
the scene too much...)

Perhaps you remember my posting from last week where I complained about
a mysterious error message indicating "too
many nested objects". Obviously, the reason for this was that in my old
scene, there were too many objects within objects
and again within objects.

Meanwhile, I rendered a new scene (attached here), and though it
contains no less than 346,201 spheres, I essentially had no
problems to get it calculated (except for I had to change to Linux as
Windows occupied too much RAM). Still there are quite
a lot of spheres rendered unnecessarily twice, but since they are
coincident, not nested objects, it nevertheless worked fine.

Each sphere is surrounded by three rings of smaller spheres along the
x-y, x-z and y-z plane, each ring contains 8 spheres,
but I didn't program exceptions for those spheres at the intersections
of the rings, so around each larger sphere, 6 spheres
were rendered twice. With #if ... #end statements sorting them out, I
could reduce the overall number of spheres to be
rendered dramatically from
1+24+24^2+24^3+24^4=346,201 down to 1+18+18^2+18^3+18^4=111,151!
Also, this should substantially decrease the rendering time - which now
was around 16 hours on an AMD K6-II at 380 MHz
with 256 megs (yes, I know, hilarious antediluvian scrap...), I didn't
keep accurate records...

And then I also will re-try my old cube fractal scene, probably refining
it by adding subtractions in the centers of each cube
side... until I arrive at something like a Sierpinsky box!

Onward to more and more sophisticated 3d fractals - any suggestions
where to look for general introductions into fractal
mathematics and modelling?

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

Now playing: Earthrise (Steve Hillage)

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