In article <3ea07feb@news.povray.org>,
 Simon Adameit <sim### [at] gaussschule-bsde> wrote:

> I just read this paper and found it to be very interesting as this could 
> perhaps be implemented in POV:
> 
> http://www.cs.utah.edu/~bes/papers/height/
> 
> I also found some other papers anout this topic but they described 
> either something like isosurfaces or required things that are surely not 
> going to be implemented in POV like memory coherent raytracing.

Neat...I was talking about something similar to this in a thread on 
scanline vs. raytracing renderers, about generating grass on the fly, 
creating the blades when testing them against a ray...I didn't think it 
was practical, but maybe it is after all. Render-time subdivision of 
meshes is something that I've been interested in for a while, though 
this is more sophisticated than any ideas I've come up with.

I'm not too sure of the usefulness though. I mean, memory is really 
cheap, especially compared to CPU power, and there has to be some render 
speed penalty for this. On the other hand, this technique could be 
adapted to make grass and other plantlife that could stretch even todays 
memory capacity, even with tricks like duplicating patches. And it has 
the advantage of only generating the triangles that are really tested 
against rays, which could actually make it faster overall.

-- 
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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