On Wed, 08 Aug 2001 22:22:48 +0200, Yadgar <j.b### [at] ndhnet> wrote:

>Mick Hazelgrove uses only about three times the RAM I own - and
>nevertheless successfully renders scenes with 30 million grass leaves!),

Mick's grass is made of meshes. Copies of the same mesh only take a
few dozens of bytes (to store a pointer and a transformation, I think)
so if you make a 1000 leaves mesh and copy it 30000 times to get 30
million, it will only eat as much memory as a 1000 leaves mesh + a
little for the 30000 copies (even if it were 1k per copy, and it's
much lower than that, that would be 30 megs, and that's nothing)

>Is there any way (e. g. some special tracing options - I looked them up
>the in Manual, but it doesn't talk about memory usage anywhere) to
>optimize RAM usage?

If you're desperate, you can turn light buffers off... though this may
greatly slow down your scene.

OTOH people are buying 768 megs of RAM for less than $128, so...

>Another question deals with the image attached here: how to do realistic
>dunes? The large-scale structures of my dunes are already quite
>satisfying (I used the "turbulence" function in Heightfield Lab to
>generate the heightfield) - but how can I do the small ripples covering
>the windward sides of the dunes? Obviously, neither ripples nor wave
>normals do the trick...

How about a marble normal? Have you tried that?

>And one last question: is there a way to make infinite heightfields
>(like the isosurfaces in MegaPOV) in official PoV-Ray?

Don't think so. Also, isosurfaces in MegaPOV are not infinite, they
are always contained in an object.


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

Post a reply to this message