I also sometime need to render lots of arrows (glyphs for vectors). But
spheres/circles is my main interest.
Mattijs
Gregory D Abram wrote:
I mean a *lot* of spheres. I've been able to render 17 million small
spheres, varying in radius from 4 to 8 pixels, in 650 meg (maybe less) in
< 2 min. I should be able to almost double the memory efficiency by using
delayed colors.
I can use Overlay to add captions and axes, though now that I try it, it
looks like my transformations are slightly off. This places the spheres on
top of another rendered image, so this won't work for rendering tubes
separately and overlaying or underlayering them.
The basic trick can be extended to rods to do ball'n'stick models, but is a
little harder since rods aren't rotationally symmetric. It'd take a bit of
work, which is on the agenda - but not too high.
So, are spheres alone, with axes and captions, useful? Or should I hold
off until I implement rods? Or does someone else want to give that a go?
Greg
