Wasn't it Patrick Dugan who wrote:
>Is there an easy way to make real dents in a metal texture.  I don't want to
>use normals because I want the dents to actually appear to remove/compress
>the metal.  In other words along an edge the metal would be missing where
>the dent was.
>
>I am making a complex metal structure and would like to create occasional
>dents in the metal.  I have a crude way of doing this by creating an object
>of 5000 small spheres in the same space as the metal object then doing a
>difference.

Have you tried using the trace() facility [v3.5 or MegaPov] to find out
which of your 5000 small spheres actually touch the surface of your
object? Once you know that, you don't need to include the spheres that
miss your object or which lie entirely inside it. This would
substantially reduce the number of objects that need to be considered in
the difference, and make it run much faster.

If you trace() from the camera position, you could also choose to only
include those dents that are actually visible from the camera position.

Remember also that it's often much faster to difference the spheres from
the individual pieces of your complex object before you union them
together. If you union first, then the bounding box is larger and fewer.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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