A POVRAY - How-to

So you want 40,000,000 objects in your renders!
by Robert J Becraft, aka castlewrks@aol.com

Approximate Object Count: Miscellaneous objects: 4,366 Vine objects:  96x5,000=480,000 Flower Pots:  15x20,000=240,000 Distant Flower Beds: 800x20,000=16,000,000 Near Flower Beds: 18x3x4x20,000=4,320,000 Other Near Beds: 18x2x4x20,000=2,880,000 Distant Trees: 40x60,000=2,400,000 Basin Trees: 20x60,000=1,200,000 Total Objects: 27,524,366

The final Image, IRTC November-December, 1999.

How many times have you rendered a scene, spending hours on the major objects in your scene.  Your buildings and other details.  You start to get a pretty good looking set of objects and run a full render of your scene.  It takes hours and you're no where near finished.  Just the parse of thousands of cylinders and cones for that solitary tree takes 30 minutes.  Oiy-vey.   However, 100,000 objects is no where near 40 million... and those are basic POV primitive objects to boot, not meshes or triangles.

Pro's: Provides a means to incorporate millions of objects into a scene without the associated parse and render times associated with each of those items. Increases image complexity, realism and composition options Increases object details by maximizing render memory associated with each object. Con's: Flat images must be oriented in a suitable orientation to be viewed by the camera. Moving the camera may require all images to be re-oriented. Animation complicates use of this method

So how do you go about generating an image with so many more objects in it than the normal parse/render will allow?

The Garden Foundation.  The garden cannot be properly designed without a good foundation.  This is a discussion of the grounds.

Some flowers. This project started with the development of a set of flowers.  Upon rendering the first flower cluster, it was realized that without a method other than straight-forward rendering of the composition, we were done before we had really gotten started.  The first few clusters contained 70,000 objects and pushed the render close to the machine limits.

A few Trees. Using the same techniques as was used for the flowers, a number of tree patterns were generated for the garden.  The tree generation routine is discussed here.

A large structure.  The garden is part of a large estate.  The manor house is included.

Some background hills and fog.  The entire estate is surrounded by suitable vistas.  

The Sky.  

A few other additions.  Pergolas, a shovel, wheelbarrow, flower pots, lily pads.

The SECRET! Transparency.  Finally, putting all the pre-generated image-maps into our final picture.

Reference Page.  Links to things I've used or found useful.

© 1999, Robert J Becraft, All Rights Reserved.