I read your post with interest, I must say. I am personally a poor student,
and cannot afford something like 3D-studio MAX. (My interest for
three-dimensional visualisation is mre based on the technical, too.)
Therefore, I have been using POV-ray for about four years and is quite happy
with it.

You are perfectly right when you say that you gain a lot by having 3dsmax,
but what is the gain compared to the price? In my opinion, POV-ray is *much*

download POV-ray?

And there is a subtle difference between 3DS and POV that is important: POV
is based on *models* of mathematical objects: A sphere *is* an exact sphere;
so is a cylinder, torus, and so forth. In polygon-based rendering systems
you only have *approximations* of the object. It's easy too observe a
polygon-based sphere, i.e. a polyhedron, as opposed to a ray-traced sphere
when you've seen it enough!

I agree that the texture definition in POV-ray is too simplistic. There are
several additions that I believe would not be a too big wish.

1. Additive/subtractive procedural textures. In the current release of
POV-ray we have the ability to combine textures in some simple ways. But
what if you coud use something like:

normal {
    bumps*0.4 + ripples*0.6 - sin(crackle * 2*pi)
}

I would define this as the addition of bumps, ripples and the subtraction of
a sine, with argument taken from cracle. Is far as I know, the textures are
defined in 3-space, resulting in a single float value. Then this would not
be too difficult to implement.

By adding several ripples, for example:
ripples + abs(sin(ripples*2*pi))
would generate a heave weather storm ocean surface!

The procedural texture definition would of course also give meaning with
pigment, finish et.c.

2. User defined proceural surfaces. The user should be able to define
something like:

pigment {
    use_procedural sin(y) * cos (x) + x*y*sin(z);
    color_map {
        ...
    }
}

(The syntax is merely illustrative.)

You take the 3-space coordinates of the surface point, and apply the

Many of the built-in textures could be rewritten:

onion = sqrt(x*x+y*y+z*z) mod 1.
wood = sqrt(x*x+y*y) mod 1
gradient = y mod 1

et.c.

About the rendering time, I am not sure. How long would it take to render
1.2 million spheres in 3ds? I've done it in POV-ray, and it takes about 2
minutes. Remember that each sphere should be an *exact* mathematical model.
In 3ds you would use perhaps twenty polygons for a small sphere. That
becomes a massive 24 million polygons, which naturally is much less
effective use of memory and rendering time. A sphere in POV-ray uses about
as much power from the computer, both in memory and rendering time, as a
polygon. This was just an example; I'm sure there are more.

Lance Birch skrev i meldingen <37f0cfd5@news.povray.org>...
>>   You have verified what many other people have discovered - that the
>> raytraced output of freeware POV-Ray can be superior to high-dollar
>> commercial software. Thank you for this revelation.
>
>Not necessarily, but a huge sight faster ;)  You've got to remember that
>you're not just paying for a renderer with MAX, you're paying for an
>animation system, IK, NURBS modeller, network renderer, full modelling
>environment (spacewarps, grids, realtime zoom, real time
>pan/roll/camera/shaded preview), real time render testing, video post
>effects system, non-linear motion editor etc.
>
>Being able to model something visually is worth everything to a
professional
>modeller, otherwise it just takes too much time!
>
>The new MAX R3 I hate to say whips POV-Ray in rendering quality if used
>right, MAX R2.5 is still about even with it I think (in the raytracing
>section anyway, and MAX is a huge amount faster in the scanliner).
>
>It's just a shame that POV-Ray can't do specific lighting or translucency
or
>I'd render to it all the time (the specific lighting is especially hard to
>get around, I use it all the time now)
>
>Also, the textures in MAX can far beat the textures in POV-Ray, having the
>ability to control ambient, bump, diffuse, reflection, refraction,
>displacement, shininess, ior, self-illumination etc all directly by ANY map
>type (bitmap, precedural, multi-layer, real time capture etc) is great for
>fine-tuning and making very detailed textures.
>
>The real point in this is:
>
>TIME... sure, someone could render an image just as good in POV-Ray as in
>MAX, but it would take soooo much longer to design that image in POV-Ray
>than it would in MAX, and time is of the essence with all professional
>graphic artists.  That's what you're paying for with MAX, ease of use and
>power in modelling.
>
>

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