> >So, to return to Sage : it should be quite doable to have one plot3d > >format be povray source-code, to be compiled separately (or which gets > >compiled in the background). That's not at all real-time, so I'm not > >sure it fits the original purpose, but it certainly can produce a movie > >(in .avi or whatever format) in the end. > > It would seem that ray tracing should be a fully parallel task. > I don't know if povray does this but given the upcoming multicore > machines this kind of technology might be closer to real time > than before. Do you know if povray can use multicore?
I don't know if it does, but if the goal is to do animations, it is trivial to assign a frame computation per core even if povray doesn't do it directly, so not much is lost. In fact, Dimensions was computed on a cluster using standard queuing for the different tasks. Now if you want only one image, quoting the povray FAQ: # 1.4.3.2 Can POV-Ray use multiple processors? # # Short answer: The only way to run POV-Ray on multiple processors is to # run several copies of POV-Ray. (You _can_ run several copies computing different lines of the same image and merge them in the end, if you really want to squeeze the last second of computation out of your Core-16-bis-quarto ...) OTOH, I read about almost-real-time raytracing by having the computations done by the GPU ... But if that is the direction you want to look into, something like OpenGL might be easier. /v -- Vincent Beffara UMPA - ENS Lyon 46 Allée d'Italie 69364 LYON cedex 07 Tel: 04 72 72 85 25 Fax: 04 72 72 84 80 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
