Hi there,

long time no see, long time no trace.
Unfortunately I didn't have much time "to POV" but finally I could manage to
do some major improvements to the fern macro.
First of all I made a whole wing as a single mesh. This increases slightly
parsing time (since I have to transform a lot of triangles "manually") but
has a huge advantage that I can save a whole fern wing as an auto-generated
include file. This speeds up parsing time dramatically when including the
generated file instead of re-computing it each time.
Additionally there are now two models of fern-wings: "standing" and
"hanging" ones. The first style is used for ferns growing on an mostly flat
ground, whereas the second style is used for ferns growing on a hill or
stone (free hanging wings).
Both styles are now controlled via the "wing age" instead of the number of
leaves on them (this is calculated automatically).
Several preview modes are supported to adjust the wings and camera quickly.
The small leaves can be controlled in their "level of detail" (LOD) which
reduces the number of mesh triangles of the leaf and it's middle stem and
simplifies the texture to speed up rendering.
For a wing you may define a "center of interest" which will control the LOD
of the leaves automatically. Objects near to this point will have more
details than objects farther away.

I think this will be the last fern images for a while since I will
concentrate now on the other participants of my scene.
Therefore I post this few pictures demonstrating the fern macro features.
Please note that there is still no complete -fern- macro but only a -wing-
and -leaf- macro. Anyway I already have some scenes building up a fern where
the usage can easily be seen.

Thank you very much for your interest and feedback!
As soon as I have some viewable results of the other objects I will (of
course)  post them here to get your opinion, so stay tuned :-) I really
enjoy the discussion here.

Ok, lets get to the pictures.

This one is a rough preview (preview mode 2) showing only the stems of the
wings (thickness is 3 times exaggregated)
The colour of the stems is twice as bright as usual to make them visible
even in dark scenes (ambient 1, diffuse 1)
This mode is very useful to adjust the stems in general.

Processing time: 2'19" (both, parse and trace) (No AA)

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