In article <39bf701f@news.povray.org>, Geoff Wedig 
<wed### [at] darwinepbicwruedu> wrote:

> Trust me, I understand.  I'm not adverse to high parse times, though. 
>  Some of my code takes ~2 hours to parse, then another 2-3 to 
> allocate memory/bounding boxes, etc.  *then* I get to render.  It 
> gets about three lines in 12 hours.  I run it over night/while I'm at 
> work (which means I get to reparse each night.  Ghods I wish there 
> was a 'pickle' function for parsed POV files!).  It might be done by 
> Christmas.

"Pickle" function?
You could have it output the objects after calculating them, so the 
calculations don't have to be done again. The file sizes would probably 
be quite big, though.
You might also get a speedup by turning vista buffering off...doing that 
will slow down rendering, but the 2-3 hours you save by not calculating 
them might make it worth it. It will also cut your memory usage down a 
bit.
If not all of the objects are visible and they aren't reflective or 
transparent, consider dropping some of them from the scene.


> But even I have limits.  I wrote a particle system for simulating 
> cloth, and even with relatively small numbers of points (~200), it 
> took forever.  So I rewrote it in C++.  Now, the above idea could be 
> coded in C++, but that requires knowing the points on the surface, 
> which means you have to code the surface in c++.  I'd probably do it 
> in 3 stages. Create object and choose drop points (in POV).  Use the 
> output system to output those drop points. Read file as input to a 
> c++ program which takes them, finds some reasonable distribution 
> (minimum distance between drops?), then does the simulation.
> 
> In any reasonable programming language, the simulation is almost 
> trivial to run.  It's only a couple of million points after all.  May 
> take 10 minutes, but compared to render time....

Instead of writing a separate program, you could do what I did with my 
particle system, and turn it into a POV patch. If you want to get points 
on an object, you have all the necessary tools right there.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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