I'm trying to render fur.  I drew an alpha map shaped like a tuft of fur,
and mapped it onto a double-illuminated polygon.  Then I covered my object
with overlapping polygons, arranged sort of like feathers are.  It looks
pretty nice so far:

http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dtw/pov/misc/_meeting022003/fur3_0.6.jpg

The downside is: slowness.  3000 polys: 4 hours.  15000 polys: 2 days.
(estimated :)

So I'm wondering how to improve the rendering speed.
- Using mesh2{} would reduce memory usage, but would it render faster?-
Should I group clumps of neighboring polys into unions to improve the
bounding-box hierarchy?
- Any other fur-rendering methods I should try?

I've already tried something similar to stacked-plane clouds, which looks
nice but is hard to do on arbitrary geometry:
http://outgrabe.hypermart.net/pov/fur2.jpg

.....and I tried using lots of transparent cones, which is too slow and
pointy-looking.
http://outgrabe.hypermart.net/pov/fur1.jpg

(I'll post sources soon if ya like)

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> I'm trying to render fur.  I drew an alpha map shaped like a tuft of fur,
> and mapped it onto a double-illuminated polygon.  Then I covered my object
> with overlapping polygons, arranged sort of like feathers are.  It looks
> pretty nice so far:

Never use alpha mapped polygons as fur... in POVRAY of course.
POV gets very slow when comes to multilevel opacity rendering,
aliasing is more visible and whole rendering process slows down.

From many people's tests it seems that raw geometry renders much more 
faster. Try Chris Colefax macros ...

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DTWallace <dav### [at] inamecom> wrote:
> - Using mesh2{} would reduce memory usage, but would it render faster?-

  If you mean that you are using the 'polygon' primitive of POV-Ray, then
a mesh should definitely use less memory and render faster. You should
certainly try it.
  Putting all the triangles into one single mesh will probably get the
fastest render time.

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -

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