Dear Colleagues,

  I wonder if someone can give me some advice as to how to optimize
povray to render very large scenes. My scene contains about 250000 frame
level objects and povray allocates about 800 MB. Needless to say that
the computer is running out of disk space (swap space) as soon as
anything else but povray runs on it. So far I am just doing some tests
but I anticipate a few crashes while povray is rendering the final
scene. Since parsing of the input takes about 1 hour and time is rather
limited I guess my question is whether it is possible to speed up at
least the parsing process. Is there a way to save the parsed scene in a
binary file so that one can re-use it after a crash ? ( I am using
povray 3.0 )

Any other thoughts ? 

  Any help is much appreciated. Thanks

   Lothar Esser

------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Lothar Esser 
Howard Hughes Medical Institute 
5323 Harry Hines Blvd.
Dallas Texas 75235-9050
E-mail : ess### [at] chopswmededu
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>  I wonder if someone can give me some advice as to how to optimize
>povray to render very large scenes. My scene contains about 250000 frame
>level objects and povray allocates about 800 MB. Needless to say that
>the computer is running out of disk space (swap space) as soon as
>anything else but povray runs on it.

How much free disk do you have? Is adding another drive an option?
Defrag, as IIRC win can't use fragmented space for it's swapfile.

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David VanHorn wrote:

> >  I wonder if someone can give me some advice as to how to optimize
> >povray to render very large scenes. My scene contains about 250000 frame
> >level objects and povray allocates about 800 MB. Needless to say that
> >the computer is running out of disk space (swap space) as soon as
> >anything else but povray runs on it.
>
> How much free disk do you have? Is adding another drive an option?
> Defrag, as IIRC win can't use fragmented space for it's swapfile.

  More disk space sounds like the answer. However if small gains are valuable
you might try DOS version if you are using rather than using windows.  It
says in the documentation that it is faster. (Is this true?)

Roger

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STUDENT wrote:
> > How much free disk do you have? Is adding another drive an option?
> > Defrag, as IIRC win can't use fragmented space for it's swapfile.
> 
>   More disk space sounds like the answer. However if small gains are valuable
> you might try DOS version if you are using rather than using windows.  It
> says in the documentation that it is faster. (Is this true?)
> 
> Roger

  It seems that I have forgotten to mention the hardware it is running
on:
  DecAlpha 500 Mhz, 256 MB ram and 2 GB swap space. (OS = Redhat Linux)
   
  The final run requires about 1.2 GB of swap space and of course uses
all of the available ram ( ca 254 Mb ).
However, it seems to experience arithmetic traps or segmentation faults
more often than I like. The latter problem is probably due to memory
management issues. ( Fortunately povray can be restarted and usually
continues without crashing again at the same trace).
 
Is there anyone who has experience with these problems? Would it help to
recompile povray using more or less optimization ? ( I compiled it with
the highest optimization on DecAlpha Digital UNIX V4.0C ) 

   Lothar

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Hi Lothar,

I do not have the URL, but I'm pretty certain what you look for is POB (Pov-Ray
Binary).
I've seen mention of that in the newsgroups and even got to see their site, but it
looks like I forgot to put a bookmark on it.

I hope this helps,
Al.


Lothar Esser wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
>   I wonder if someone can give me some advice as to how to optimize
> povray to render very large scenes. My scene contains about 250000 frame
> level objects and povray allocates about 800 MB. Needless to say that
> the computer is running out of disk space (swap space) as soon as
> anything else but povray runs on it. So far I am just doing some tests
> but I anticipate a few crashes while povray is rendering the final
> scene. Since parsing of the input takes about 1 hour and time is rather
> limited I guess my question is whether it is possible to speed up at
> least the parsing process. Is there a way to save the parsed scene in a
> binary file so that one can re-use it after a crash ? ( I am using
> povray 3.0 )

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Alain CULOS wrote in message <354### [at] bigfootcom>...
>I do not have the URL, but I'm pretty certain what you look for is POB
(Pov-Ray Binary).
>I've seen mention of that in the newsgroups and even got to see their site,
>but it looks like I forgot to put a bookmark on it.

POB can be found on Thomas Baiers webpage:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/thbaier

Johannes.

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What is the scene file!!!  It must be huge!!!  I'd love to see the final
image :-)

--
Lance Birch
Remove the smiley to e-mail.
http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/ambient/lance

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Lothar Esser wrote:
> 
>   I wonder if someone can give me some advice as to how to optimize
> povray to render very large scenes. My scene contains about 250000
> frame level objects and povray allocates about 800 MB.

If you are declaring any objects as unions of stuff, and then making
lots of copies of that object, consider declaring them as meshes of
triangles.  It takes a little more work, but the memory pay-offs are
enormous.

Note:  This only works if you do nothing more to each copy than
transform and or retexture it.

Of coruse, with 250,000 objects, this may not make much difference...

-- 
"What can I say?  Everyone likes flowers, even us evildoers." -- Zorak

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