Are you using #declared objects?

POV uses much less memory if you do this:

#declare Tetrahedron =
    mesh {
        // your shape
    }

object { TetraHedron rotate 360*VRand(Seed) }
object { TetraHedron rotate 360*VRand(Seed) }
object { TetraHedron rotate 360*VRand(Seed) }
object { TetraHedron rotate 360*VRand(Seed) }
object { TetraHedron rotate 360*VRand(Seed) }
...


Though admittedly I wouldn't expect much saving with only 4 polys.

Also it might be quicker to use CSG objects instead of triangles. I'm not sure
how pov implements triangle meshes (I never use them). You could just do the
intersection of 4 planes. In fact I just worked out the maths so I can't resist
putting it here :)

#declare Tetrahedron =
    intersection {
        plane { <1,1,1>, 1 }
        plane { <-1,1,-1>, 1 }
        plane { <1,-1,-1>, 1 }
        plane { <-1,-1,1>, 1 }
    }

That should do it.
Though it's gone midnight and I might have made a glaring error :)

--
Tek
http://www.evilsuperbrain.com


jimbobjim <jim### [at] blueyondercouk> wrote in message
news:3c754e72@news.povray.org...
> Hi
> A few days ago I saw this link in povray.off-topic
> http://www.henrywagner.org/povray/images/field1.htm and decided to re-create
> the scene.
> I got a fair-ish representation last week and added the poser people and the
> boat today.
>
> Although I have a question about what pov does during the parse stage.
> During test renders I was using ~30,000 objects (pyramid2 from shapes.inc)
> for which the total trace time was just a few minutes. For the final render
> I used ~60,000 of these objects and even though the trace only took a few
> minutes, pov took 25 minutes to during the parse to create light and vista
> buffers. Is there anything I can do to speed this process up? I changed the
> union to a mesh in the pyramid2 definition and that helped loads - peak
> memory used dropped from 50Mb to about 14Mb in the 30K object case - but on
> the final render peak memory was 125Mb and my machine has only 64Mb so
> windows was thrashing the virtual mem a bit. (maybe I just answered my own
> question)
>
> Thanks
> Jim
>
>
>

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