In article <3eac0502@news.povray.org>, Wolfgang Wieser <wwi### [at] gmxde> 
wrote:

> Okay, then please give me your advice: How should I set up the scene 
> correctly? I'll do just that and we'll see if it looks nice. 
> 
> I want to animate a space ship which flies to a planet, along a valley 
> in the topography and back up into space. 

A sphere primitive for the planet. As you get closer, a mesh of the area 
visible from the ship...a few hundred thousand triangles, maybe a 
million. Once you get close to the canyon, switch to a high level of 
detail mesh, the detail will probably require a million or so. Then back 
through a medium LOD mesh (maybe the same as the one on incoming, maybe 
different) and then switch to the sphere again. 2 or 3 meshes, none 
having anything near 100 million triangles. You could set things up so 
you have one bigger mesh with variable amounts of detail, highest in the 
canyon...simpler but less efficient, but nowhere near as bad as your 
idea of using a full-resolution mesh of an entire freaking planet. 
*That* is just wasteful on current systems, even if you have the RAM for 
it.

-- 
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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