Sorry for not having stated in this message about MegaPOV.  The prior
posting a few posts back does say this though.  Don't know why I failed to
mention it this time.

"MR" <a### [at] bnet> wrote in message news:3bb85a47$1@news.povray.org...
> the movie was impressive.  i tried to run it in 3.1 and found out
> that it was a megapov thing.  will it run in 3.5?  i'm a newbie and
> i've got my hands full with learning 3.1 so i think i should avoid
> 3.5 until it comes out officially, but i loved the tornado and am
> interested to know if it will "fly" in it.  i'm scared of megapov...
> i believe a certain level of expertise beyond mine is a requirement
> for running unofficial pov versions.

Well, it would run in official v3.1 okay if not for one thing I believe.
That being sphere_sweep.  It's a perfect object for the tornado shapes.
blob could be used but for the equivalent shapes it might be much slower.
Aside from that, media methods are the only other non-3.1 thing (if I recall
my file right) and can be changed to have no 'method'.

Needless to say this thing is very slow to animate even at low quality media
settings.  With high enough samples to get a decent render it isn't
animatable within a day or two on moderate machines.  But foregoing more
perfect results it can be animated small with low samples in a relatively
short time.

As Ken has said, you'd be doing yourself a favor by moving on to v3.5.  I
just don't recommend you doing so until it's final release while it goes
through changes and needs many reinstalls.  The MegaPOV aspect of it isn't
really an issue, v3.5 is just a upgraded POV-Ray (obviously).  Using MegaPOV
in itself along with v3.1 is actually easy too, just put the executable into
the \bin\ subfolder and run it instead of the pvengine.exe.  It is seamless
enough and you can use Shortcut links (Windows anyhow) to either one you
wish.  It isn't a whole new installation.  Besides that the difference in
running scripts depends only on adding the #version unofficial MegaPov
directive if not already present or using none for official files (it still
renders officially too).

You could have a look at the tornado script I posted to
povray.text.scene-files in the meantime too.  It uses cone and torus
instead, just not comparable to this macro tornado.

MegaPOV link just in case:  http://www.nathan.kopp.com/patched.htm

Bob H.

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