Spheres only is good for me.
Peter At 10:05 10/01/2002 -0500, you 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
