POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.general : "Stairway of the Gods" on Rama Server Time
3 Aug 2024 04:16:35 EDT (-0400)
  "Stairway of the Gods" on Rama (Message 1 to 5 of 5)  
From: Tom A 
Subject: "Stairway of the Gods" on Rama
Date: 25 Jun 2004 17:09:32
Message: <40dc948c$1@news.povray.org>
I was re-reading _Rendezvous With Rama_ and thought I'd render it, to 
get a feel for the size of the thing.  It's Big.

(For those who haven't read it - it's a hollow, cylindrical cylinder 
with an interior 50 km long, and an internal diameter of 16 km.  It 
rotates to generate artificial gravity against the inner surface.)

At the airlock end, there are three stairways that go from the base of a 
km long ladder and follow a mostly hemispherical slope to the flat part 
of the cylinder.

I got the end's shape - there are six platforms that cicle the 
hemispherical slope - and ran a trace() to place steps made of boxes. 
It generated over 10,000 steps.  The parse went fairly quickly.  Then 
the render started.

I'm doing this on a Windows 98 system with an Athelon 2200 (which is 
equivalent of a 1.2G pentium).  It was rendering 130 pixels per _minute_.

Needless to say, I pulled the stairway.

Anyone have a suggestion for a quicker render?

Tom A.

(If you haven't read it, I suggest _Rendezvous with Rama_ by A. C. Clarke.)


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From: "Jérôme M. Berger"
Subject: Re: "Stairway of the Gods" on Rama
Date: 25 Jun 2004 17:42:37
Message: <40dc9c4d$1@news.povray.org>
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Hash: SHA1

Tom A. wrote:
| I got the end's shape - there are six platforms that cicle the
| hemispherical slope - and ran a trace() to place steps made of
boxes. It
| generated over 10,000 steps.  The parse went fairly quickly.  Then the
| render started.
|
| I'm doing this on a Windows 98 system with an Athelon 2200 (which is
| equivalent of a 1.2G pentium).  It was rendering 130 pixels per
_minute_.
|
| Needless to say, I pulled the stairway.
|
| Anyone have a suggestion for a quicker render?

	Use a hierarchy of manual bounding boxes, it might speed things a
lot (in older versions of POV it did, I don't know if that got
improved since).

		Jerome

- --
******************************
*      Jerome M. Berger      *
* mailto:jbe### [at] ifrancecom *
*  http://jeberger.free.fr/  *
******************************
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From: Tim Soderstrom
Subject: Re: "Stairway of the Gods" on Rama
Date: 27 Jun 2004 23:20:43
Message: <pan.2004.06.28.03.21.00.745375@stic.net>
Heh, my last render that I did took over 17 hours! Makes me really want
PVMPov or MPIPov to be release for 3.5 or 3.6 :) It's amazing how much
faster computers have gone...and we're still taking a really long time to
render scenes. The only different? Well they are a whole heck of a lot
better :)

Tim


On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 16:09:32 -0500, Tom A. wrote:

> I was re-reading _Rendezvous With Rama_ and thought I'd render it, to 
> get a feel for the size of the thing.  It's Big.
> 
> (For those who haven't read it - it's a hollow, cylindrical cylinder 
> with an interior 50 km long, and an internal diameter of 16 km.  It 
> rotates to generate artificial gravity against the inner surface.)
> 
> At the airlock end, there are three stairways that go from the base of a 
> km long ladder and follow a mostly hemispherical slope to the flat part 
> of the cylinder.
> 
> I got the end's shape - there are six platforms that cicle the 
> hemispherical slope - and ran a trace() to place steps made of boxes. 
> It generated over 10,000 steps.  The parse went fairly quickly.  Then 
> the render started.
> 
> I'm doing this on a Windows 98 system with an Athelon 2200 (which is 
> equivalent of a 1.2G pentium).  It was rendering 130 pixels per _minute_.
> 
> Needless to say, I pulled the stairway.
> 
> Anyone have a suggestion for a quicker render?
> 
> Tom A.
> 
> (If you haven't read it, I suggest _Rendezvous with Rama_ by A. C. Clarke.)


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From: Tom A 
Subject: Re: "Stairway of the Gods" on Rama
Date: 28 Jun 2004 09:12:03
Message: <40e01923$1@news.povray.org>
Tom A. wrote:
> I was re-reading _Rendezvous With Rama_ and thought I'd render it, to 
> get a feel for the size of the thing.  It's Big.
> 
> (For those who haven't read it - it's a hollow, cylindrical cylinder 
> with an interior 50 km long, and an internal diameter of 16 km.  It 
> rotates to generate artificial gravity against the inner surface.)
> 
> At the airlock end, there are three stairways that go from the base of a 
> km long ladder and follow a mostly hemispherical slope to the flat part 
> of the cylinder.
> 
> I got the end's shape - there are six platforms that cicle the 
> hemispherical slope - and ran a trace() to place steps made of boxes. It 
> generated over 10,000 steps.  The parse went fairly quickly.  Then the 
> render started.
> 
> I'm doing this on a Windows 98 system with an Athelon 2200 (which is 
> equivalent of a 1.2G pentium).  It was rendering 130 pixels per _minute_.
> 
> Needless to say, I pulled the stairway.
> 
> Anyone have a suggestion for a quicker render?
> 
> Tom A.
> 
> (If you haven't read it, I suggest _Rendezvous with Rama_ by A. C. Clarke.)

Boy, is my face red.

I placed the stairway code in the wrong place - it was in a difference 
construct.  I was imbedding the stairs, rather than raising them.

Put the code on the other side of the } and it vastly sped up.  (With my 
debug lighting I got about 1500 pps.  When I turn on Rama's six area 
lights, it drops to about 500.  Oh well.)

Thanks for the suggestion.

Tom A.


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From: John D  Gwinner
Subject: Re: "Stairway of the Gods" on Rama
Date: 3 Jul 2004 12:02:52
Message: <40e6d8ac@news.povray.org>
When do we get to see a WIP?  Looking forward to that.

I was working on an ONeil colony a while ago, hit a snag with heightfields
on the inside of a hollow cylinder.  I later saw a fix for that but then ran
into an odd scaling problemw with Photons, which I never got resolved.

        == John ==

"Tom A." <met### [at] yahoocom> wrote in message
news:40e01923$1@news.povray.org...

> > (For those who haven't read it - it's a hollow, cylindrical cylinder
> > with an interior 50 km long, and an internal diameter of 16 km.  It
> > rotates to generate artificial gravity against the inner surface.)

...

> Put the code on the other side of the } and it vastly sped up.  (With my
> debug lighting I got about 1500 pps.  When I turn on Rama's six area
> lights, it drops to about 500.  Oh well.)


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