[Papervision3D] Large scenes

[Edwin van Rijkom]

Hi all,

I don't know a lot about 3D, so please forgive me if I say silly things, 
but:

On testing with the HelloPlane sample a bit, I found that running a 
scene with 5000 wire-frame material planes randomly sized and spread 
with a 250000 radius works quite well. However, changing the radius to 
500 nearly freezes my system.

I guess this means that the bottle-neck with Paper isn't with the AS 
code execution times, but with the Flash player's rendering-times (since 
in both cases, the same AS code gets run - the difference is in the 
number (and size of) objects that actually get drawn on stage). If 
that's all true, than in order to have Paper perform well with larger 
scenes it would have to be smart about what it lets Flash draw, and what 
not (I'm sure there's a good 3D term for that :)).

At this time, I think the only objects excluded from being rendered on 
stage are those that are behind the view-plane. I was wondering if it 
would be possible to also:

- exclude objects that are fully obscured by others.
- exclude objects that would project to a 2D area of insignificant size.

Perhaps another idea would be to have objects support 'visibilty 
levels'? On adding an object to a scene, one would be able to specify a 
camera distance at which the object should no longer requirer projection 
onto the view plane?

Cheers,
Edwin