In article <3ee4de11$1@news.povray.org>,
 "Andrew Coppin" <orp### [at] btinternetcom> wrote:

> I'd be interested to see one go in realtime... (Actually, some of my Chaos
> Pendulunm renders nearly had POV-Ray in realtime... I presume it's preview
> window isn't designed with realtime performance in mind. It goes way faster
> if I switch it off!)

Yes, the display routines are not intended to display a high framerate. 
The time taken to display the image is not long enough to bother 
optimizing though...what's a few hundred milliseconds when the render 
takes seconds, let alone minutes or hours?
In addition to that, parsing is pretty slow, especially when you're 
talking about doing real-time stuff.


> I've yet to see texturing have any significant effect on my renders...

Texturing and lighting can have a surprisingly large impact, though you 
can easily overpower it with some forms of geometry. One of my earliest 
patches was a depth buffer render mode...it was much faster than doing 
all the texture calculations, and I used it as a quick preview for a 
while. You could use the quality switches to cut out most of these 
calculations in the official version.


> > POV builds such a structure automatically,
> > though manual bounding can still give better results in some cases.
> 
> ...such as building polyhedrons out of planes using CSG? (I do this all the
> time... *is* there any other way to build polyhedrons in POV?!?)

Yes, that is one good example. POV can't bound an intersection of 
infinite shapes, you really need to manually bound when making 
polyhedrons that way. There are alternate methods: you could use boxes 
or meshes. An intersection of two boxes makes an efficient octahedron, 
and of course a box is the best way to do a cube.

-- 
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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