Software/shave/instancing.htm

<< Shave and a Haircut:EXTREME >>

So what the hell is a MetaPoly (TM)? Basically, Shave now contains a polygonal render capable of rendering billions of polygons with a paultry few megabytes of RAM. You can create scenes with virtually infinite detail. MetaPolys are rendertime creations that don't hang around in RAM. They're polygons that draw themselves, and get lost - never to be heard from again. They don't hang around in RAM making snacks of your available memory, borrowing your favorite CDs, or any of the general mooching that most polys are known for. Now, instead of just growing hair from surfaces, you can grow objects. In the above example 2 instances of a tree were created (about 60,000 polys each), then a ground plane with guide hairs. From this Shave grew the forest depicted above (without filling up any additional RAM with poly data). You can now model your hairs. You want a field of wheat? Model a wheat plant (with seeds), and Shave will do the rest. You want a field of daisys.. whatever. Since Shave is growing this stuff like it grows hair, it will also obey Shave's density maps, cut maps, color maps, displacements, guide hairs, dynamics etc - so color, texturing and shape are varied instance to instance. You can use as many layers of instances as you'd like (like one for grass, another for weeds, another for pebbles...), if you crave even more variety. The possibilitys are truely unlimited. You can also do nifty recursion tricks, like make a braid of hair (in Shave), and export it as an object - this will freeze it into polys - then import it as an instance, and you have a head full of (dynamic) braids. The MetaPoly render is embeded in the same plugin that the hair render is, and it is BLISTERINGLY fast. The images in the above quicktime movie were about 2.5 minutes per AA pass with 1/4 Billion polys each (all shadow options ON) on a PIII laptop.