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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