Re: TBoundSphere performance

It's not surprising that so much time is spent on this.   It takes the 
mesh and creates a tight sphere-covering to accelerate ray intersection 
testing.

It's possible to trade space for time by storing the resulting 
sphere-tree with the mesh source, rather than recalculating it at load 
time.   But the storage space explosion factor is enormous, and it's not 
clear whether reading in the sphere-tree wouldn't be slow due to file 
reading (it certainly is slow to send across a slowish network).

You could get a constant factor by just making a primitive out of a few 
of the inner loops, or even much better improvement by using CUDA 
organized parallelized code (nice research project).

Alternatively, and probably much better, change the ray-mesh 
intersection code (the only client for the sphere-tree) by subclassing 
the operation by known techniques optimiized for your mesh's 
properties.  OOP is designed for this!

Steve Wart wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have some large meshes that are taking a long time to activate. It 
> looks like a lot of the time is spent in a method called initBounds, 
> which in turn is spending a lot of time in 
> TBoundSphere>>calcTree:faces:depth:
>
> Have there been any efforts in optimizing this method (e.g. making it 
> a primitive)?
>
> Any suggestions on how to approach this? Slang? FFI? Something more 
> clever?
>
> Steve