"s.day" <s.d### [at] uelacuk> wrote:

>
> You could always use a linear spline with lots of points, this would
> follow your spline points exactly and can be made to look pretty
> smooth...
>

That idea didn't occur to me. (And I've never noticed *any* problems with the
linear spline.) I can see this working quite well (as your example image
demonstrates; thanks for that.) In fact, the 'linear' nature of the final
shape--if looked at on a tiny scale-- would not be too far removed from what I'm
doing now. That is, my 3000X3000 preliminary image render of the windshield
area, when seen close-up, has a 'pixel stairstep' appearance anyway. In essence,
linear--and it's being scanned that way too. EXCEPT that a sphere_sweep would be
*smooth*-- no 'micro bumpiness' like my current many-spheres technique.

This is an intriguing idea! The thing is, I've forgotten if a sphere_sweep
object is 'evaluated' by POV-Ray at parse time or during the rendering stage. If
the latter, that might slow things down during my animation (regardless of
#writing the sphere_sweep to a file beforehand.) And maybe the same situation
using blobs.

I'll have to try this to see.


> I recommend adding a bounded_by as performance
> is pretty poor otherwise and probably as part of the spline bounding issue it
> seems that you have to put the sphere_sweep inside a union and bound the union
> otherwise it makes no difference to performance.

Thanks for the good advice!

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