"Bill Pragnell" <bil### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message 
news:web.49b4ee36d4fd5b286dd25f0b0@news.povray.org...
> I'm not sure my macros are the best solution for that; even if you're 
> genuinely
> after a cone, you're better off just writing a simple cone mesh macro for
> yourself. I'd be inclined to use very simple flat triangle-based leaves, 
> and
> don't worry about smoothing - it's surprising how far a low-detail leaf 
> goes if
> it's not going to be seen in closeup.

Well its actually the difference of two very closely spaced cones, to 
produce a concave leaf. I am sure that even a single triangle would work, 
but I've never used them, ever, so am profoundly lost...more stuff that I 
need to learn. :-p

> Make sure your leaf/cone macros just output triangles, not a complete 
> mesh -
> have another macro build a clump of leaves as a single mesh that you can 
> then
> clone.

Do you know of any simple files which would be a starting point?

>
> Definitely. I'd expect it to need less than 10% of your current usage, if 
> the
> meshes are deployed properly. You might not see a drastic speed up for
> high-quality renders, because this sort of thing gets slowed down quite a 
> lot
> by the antialiasing, but you should find that non-aa tests run blindingly 
> fast.
>

Ok. I ran the macro on a a cyl column, just to see what you might be looking 
at.
It ended up taking 7min to parse with 90 vines and 15k moss object tests 
(thats why you don't see many of them). I'm going to retry with 500k moss 
object tests. It is clear that I need to also optimize the way in which 
trace is being used in this macro to drop the parse time, though changing 
the direction of the test vector has a LOT to do with everything. I have a 
decent amount of work ahead, as this is still just using the first code I 
threw together.

Here are the stats for the column test followed by the image (note my kernel 
time...6.66...yuck!):

Render Statistics
Image Resolution 1280 x 1024

Pixels:          1312000   Samples:         1448368   Smpls/Pxl: 1.10
Rays:            1683045   Saved:                 0   Max Level: 5/5

Ray->Shape Intersection          Tests       Succeeded  Percentage

Cone/Cylinder                 11779353         2352125     19.97
CSG Intersection               1301463          138887     10.67
CSG Union                      5081629          562648     11.07
Sphere                         5581614         1036479     18.57
Bounding Box                  26652056        11990304     44.99
Light Buffer                  49398689        21346439     43.21
Vista Buffer                  12582545         8880334     70.58

Calls to Noise:                   0   Calls to DNoise:         1333006

Shadow Ray Tests:           1213449   Succeeded:                384576
Transmitted Rays:            234677
I-Stack overflows:              685

Smallest Alloc:                  18 bytes
Largest  Alloc:              992880 bytes
Peak memory used:         138525975 bytes
Total Scene Processing Times
  Parse Time:    0 hours  7 minutes  1 seconds (421 seconds)
  Photon Time:   0 hours  0 minutes  0 seconds (0 seconds)
  Cloth Time:    0 hours  0 minutes  0 seconds (0 seconds)
  Mechsim Time:  0 hours  0 minutes  0 seconds (0 seconds)
  Render Time:   0 hours  0 minutes 10 seconds (10 seconds)
  Postpr. Time:  0 hours  0 minutes  0 seconds (0 seconds)
  Total Time:    0 hours  7 minutes 11 seconds (431 seconds)
CPU time used: kernel 6.66 seconds, user 416.14 seconds, total 422.80 
seconds
Render averaged 3100.12 PPS over 1310720 pixels

POV-Ray finished

ian

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