On Sat, 23 Feb 2002 13:26:55 +0100, "Hugo" <hua### [at] post3teledk> wrote:
> > (of course I know sphere sweeps are slow in nature).
>
> I wonder why spheresweeps exsist in POV at all..

For me they are usefull. Idea is good. Perhaps implementation needs
improvements. At this moment they use less memory than cones and are more
accurate in any zoom.

For example my case - I started scene on server of my company - memory is
important issuse. There is more then 16.000 instances. It use (looking at task
manager from NT4) about 80 MB of RAM. Each instance has 9 entries so let's
imagine - I need to replace each sphere_sweep with at least 80 cones - so this
means I need 1.280.000 cones (and the same amount of spheres). I can't use so
much memory on this server (even if it has 1GB of RAM) no talking about my own
machine with 128 MB of RAM. So as I said: idea is good but perhaps some fix in
sources could speed it up - we have to wait for 3.5 sources probably.

> I may sound negative, but
> these shapes can be achieved with cones and render much quicker!

But with sphere_sweep you can still do it. Just don't look at sphere_sweeps
:-)

> wouldn't it be possible to code an
> internal "repeating-cones" algoritm in POV ...

You mean repeating cones with constant radius ? It is basic macro usage.
Or you mean repeating cones along spline with float radius? That is what
linear sphere_sweep does.

ABX

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