In article <3d6f6e72$1@news.povray.org>, "Slime" <slm### [at] slimelandcom> 
wrote:

> #declare a grass blade, and then place however many of them with
> object{grassblade translate...}. Then it's not creating a new object in
> memory for every blade.

Wrong, it does create a new object for each blade. With meshes, the 
geometry data gets shared between all the copies, so you can make lots 
of complex objects with very little memory...each mesh only needs 
transformations, flags, a pointer to the geometry data, and maybe 
textures (I'm not sure how textures are handled).

The usual method of making grass is to make a mesh of a patch of grass, 
and duplicate that patch around the scene. To avoid tiling effects, you 
can randomly select from an array of several different patches and/or 
randomly rotate or flip (scale by -1 along a dimension) the patches.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

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