In article <397DD493.909A1DC0@schunter.etc.tu-bs.de>, 
chr### [at] gmxde wrote:

> All that is not really effective, because you have to carry the whole 
> "air" around that is never used.  

I'm not sure what you mean...even though it isn't used, you still have 
to store it. The "air" is simply any voxel with a density of 0, you have 
to store these voxels along with all the others.
An alternative would be to store the coordinates, size, and density of 
each voxel. For some files, this would be smaller...but for others, it 
would be a lot larger.
A compromise might be to partition the file into cubical chunks, each 
one with it's own resolution. That way, large areas of a single value 
could be represented as a single voxel, while areas with a lot of 
small-scale changes could still be accurately represented. There are 
probably better ways to compress the data, though...

-- 
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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