This Bird of Prey was created by Kevin Walter and can be seen on MOC pages at http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/194602.

This was a truly epic rendering project.  The CAD model has almost 275,000 parts.  The exported POV-Ray input file was over 50 Mb even using
LGEO part substitution!!  This means virtually none of the parts were actually contained in the file, only references to their location in
space.  Once all the include files are parsed, the amount of data is unimaginably huge.  As you can imagine, even my quad core machine with 4
Gb of RAM was not even close to being able to parse the file and simply crashed after 30 seconds.

My first attempt at correcting the problem was to go into each and every one of the LGEO files called by the model (about 200 of them) and
remove unnnecessary detail from the part.  For example, a 2x4 brick had the studs and stud tubes removed along with all the chamfers so it was
just a rectangular prism.  It took over a week to make all of these modifications which I calculate reduced the parsing allocation by about a
factor of 10.  Sadly, it was not even close to enough as it still would not parse.

I ran up against the fact that the 32-bit version of Windows can only address 4Gb of memory, including virtual memory.  So even if I had more
RAM it would not have helped.  The only way around this was to borrow a friend's machine with XP64 installed.  By addressing over 15Gb of
virtual memory I was able to get the (reduced) file to parse, and only then could I start playing with the lighting and radiosity.  The laptop
I used would overheat and shut down about 50% of the time requiring me to start over.  I hope the result is worth it!

Eric Albrecht
blakbird