In article <3ee6649f@news.povray.org>, Micha Riser <mri### [at] gmxnet> 
wrote:

> Another interesting thing to think about is: Why do we use triangles? As
> today there are often tens of triangles per pixel in a detailed model one
> doesn't really need the full triangles. So another idea is to stick to
> points and not store the interconnections of the points but only the points
> assosiated with a normal and a texture. This reduces the memory
> requirements. For the rendering you draw either a small box for each point
> (which is supported by todays GPUs) or more exact a small ellipse. Using
> points as basing privmitives has another advantage: You can quickly
> generate different LODs of models (which is much slower for triangle
> meshs), so you can use a reduced-point version when an object is farther
> away.

Point fields can be raytraced as well...there's an algorithm that 
basically uses a disc for each point, intersecting with several nearby 
discs and interpolating normals and intersection points. I've been 
working on an implementation, but it isn't even rendering plain discs 
yet.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

Post a reply to this message