In article <397DB98D.FDD8D770@schunter.etc.tu-bs.de>, 
chr### [at] gmxde wrote:

> You must have a really fast computer to suggest those things...

Well, depends on whether or not you consider a 266MHz PowerPC G3 "really 
fast". I would call it "fairly fast", and more than adequate for most 
uses, but for real number-crunching, you should get a 450MHz G4 
Cube...or one of the dual-G4 Power Macs. :-)


> Another nice thing about real 3d-erosion would be that you could 
> easily add support for layers of different materials with different 
> erodability, you could also think of tectonics, but i would suggest 
> to by lots of RAM and a really fast CPU first :-)

*Lots* of ram...since a 3df file is simply 256-bit grayscale, you would 
need separate 3df files to specify those other variables. And to get a 
large landscape, you would need a fairly high-res landscape file(the 
others, like erodability maps, could be much lower resolution).
A 256*64*256 file would equal 4MB...3df doesn't have any compression. 
And 512*128*512 would be 32MB. Good thing interpolation is available. :-)

It would help if someone developed a 3D-PNG format...3ng?...though RAM 
would still be a problem. I have 96MB, and have bumped into the RAM 
barrier a couple times(I have virtual memory set to the minimum, for 
speed reasons).

-- 
Christopher James Huff - Personal e-mail: chr### [at] maccom
TAG(Technical Assistance Group) e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
Personal Web page: http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG Web page: http://tag.povray.org/

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