> Again, if you make the whole fern one mesh (or at least each wing) this
> would seriously speed up the render.  BTW as usual with such a geometry

You already mentioned it and I followed already (partially) your suggestion.
Thanks for that.
Up to now each leaf is a single mesh (I merged the two meshed that built up
the leaf before).
Since the leaves are transformed after creation I would have to put all the
possible transformations into the mesh generation routine. A fern wing is a
really flexible macro that reacts on shape variables, age, "weakness" and
more. I don't want to put all these algorithms into the leaf macro since
they are only related to the wing (beside the size and age of the leaves).
That's not nice and less flexible. Additionally I like the object-oriented
apporach more than a putting-it-all-into-one-object mechanism. Of course on
the cost of rendering time.

But what is the difference? If I make single objects, POV builds a bounding
box around it at doesn't care about the object if the ray doesn't hit it.
This check is done on a pretty high level. Any sub-processing is skipped for
this object.
If it is a single mesh with a lot of holes in it (between the leaves) it
hits the bounding box all the time and has to analyse the mesh-triangles
before it decides to do nothing. Is that really faster?

> generating function it would probably be useful to add file writing
> routines that you can load the fern from file if you want to render it a
> second time.

That would be cool of course. I have first to get used to the file routine
stuff (if any) in POV 3.1g. AFAIK there is a lot of support for this in 3.5
beta but I don't want to download a new beta (which costs me almost an hour)
every 2 or 3 weeks.

Thanks a lot for you comments!
regards
SY

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