Wasn't it Tek who wrote:
>This maybe a dumb question...
>
>I'm trying to create a forest for my IRTC entry. I initially put in
>placeholders (8000 cones and spheres) which worked fine, but now I've tried
>to replace them with proper trees and I keep running out of memory. Even if
>I reduce it to only 80 trees it still runs out (despite me having 512MB RAM
>and a 2Gig virtual memory file).
>
>I've tried using Splinetree and MakeTree and I get the same problem with
>both. I thought that with pov if you had multiple copies of the same object
>they didn't take up loads of memory, or is that only meshes?
>
>Does anyone know how I can make a forest of 8000 trees without pov trying to
>use 8000 times the memory it needs for one tree?
>
>Any help would be much appreciated

Paul T Dawson once released meshtree.inc that creates a tree as a mesh.
If you arrange for there to be only a few actual different mesh trees
you can create an image with a large number of copies of those few trees
quite efficiently. Randomly scale and rotate the copies and they look
reasonably different.

I ran a quick test on my 850 MHz machine, and 8000 copies of the same
highly detailed tree rendered in 59 seconds at 800x600 without AA. Peak
memory used was 29.6 Mb.

In my test, each tree had 584 branches and 6144 leaves, so the entire
orchard had over 49 million leaves.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

Post a reply to this message