news:3f9ea208@news.povray.org...
> I'm trying to create as large a mesh as possible with my available
> memory. I have questions about what may help.

People are going to give you very precise answers about memory use and
meshes, but in my experience, for practical purpose, you can fit a lot of
big meshes in 1 Go (which is what I
have). For instance, in a scene I'm working on, I have around 4-500 Mb worth
of different meshes and textures, and I'm rendering this at 4800*6400 with
radiosity. Note that mesh size is not only a RAM issue, but also a parsing
time one: scenes that takes several minutes to parse limit your own
development time.

Here are some memory saving ideas if the computer starts swapping:

- some meshes (typically man-made objects rather than organic ones) can
benefit from symmetry and repetition. For instance, a car mesh can be made
of a half-car, one wheel/tyre and of the remaining non-symmetrical pieces.
The full car is then made of the half-car and its mirror, 4 copies of the
wheel and of the other pieces. The wheel itself can be a created as a
quarter of the object. Stuff like bolts and small details can also benefit a
lot from instanciation, provided that you know where to put them.

- not all objects must be full-res and not all parts of an object deserve to
be full-res. Reserve the full res for the main visible parts of the main
objects and use smaller res for everything else. Modellers can also help you
to reduce the poly count. In Rhino, I fine tune the poly count for each
object part according to its importance and visibility in the final image.
Low res versions can also be handy during tests and for tricks like what
follows:

- render in several passes. Purists will certainly throw things at me, but
nothing (apart a clear conscience and reflection-crazy scenes) prevents you
from adding some objects at a later stage, by rendering them separately and
then cutting and pasting the partiel renders where they belong in the pic.
If you have low-res versions of the other objects, you can even use them to
participate in reflections, radiosity etc. shown in the partial render. In
one case, I rendered the main object over a simplified background (but with
the right shapes, colors and lighting) and then pasted it in the picture
rendered without it using a mask. It was a big time and RAM saver.

Of course, this is all scene-dependent ultimately.

G.

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