David Fontaine wrote:

> Okay, I have this tree here, but, I want to make a scene like Bob's with
> the lights on on the tree... With only about 10% of them on and no
> radiosity it goes about 10pps or so... What's the best way to speed it
> up and get the desired effect?

I'm not sure if this would work, but it's worth a shot.  Put light fading on
the lights so that they only create a noticeable illumination difference
within a reasonably small radius from them.  You could then bound each of the
lights by a sphere large enough so that anything outside of it won't be
noticeably affected by the light.  That way you avoid lots of unnecessary
calculations.

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David Fontaine wrote:

> How do I bound a light_source?
> error: No matching } in light_source, bounded_by found instead

Hmmm, it appears that you can't, I guess I have a feature request now though
(actually it would be nice if pov could automatically not include those lights
which are too dim to affect the the illumination at a point in its calculations).

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Eric Freeman wrote:

> I hate to be that guy who has to top everybody's story, but I used to make
> fractals on my Casio fx-7700G calculator.  Not only slow, but it really ate
> the batteries.

Well now I have to try to top your story :-) I used to raytrace images on my
HP-48, now that took a long time, I had scenes trace at less than three
seconds per pixel.  The worst part was that there were extremely simple
scenes, complex scenes would just take too long to even attempt.

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