Yes I'd have to agree.  Most high-end commercial packages are aimed at speed
(for obvious reasons) and use scan line in combination with post processing
or selected raytracing.

I think in a lot of cases what you're really paying the huge money for with
things like Maya, Lightwave and MAX are the GUIs (which are incredibly
important to commercial workers).

In terms of final rendering quality I think that POV-Ray matches, if not
beats the output of a lot of commercial renderers.  I think in the end it
really comes down to the artist's ability to use the program effectively.
(which is the reason that the ever-talented Gilles Tran can produce images
that are of incredible quality and beauty :)

--
Lance.
The Zone - http://come.to/the.zone
Gilles Tran <tra### [at] inapginrafr> wrote in message
news:38359AE2.DD9733BA@inapg.inra.fr...
> From what I learnt reading material here and there (no direct experience),
> it seems that the main difference is that commercial packages are usually
> not ray-tracers. They use faster rendering algorithms and use ray-tracing
> only when it's necessary. Therefore they seem to have much shorter
rendering
> times. Other differences I can think of :
> They rely on meshes and not on 3D primitives, which permits non-linear
> transformations (POV of course also supports meshes so it's possible to do
> so, see the Warp/Colefax mesh macros).
> They seem to rely on lots of optimizations and "tricks" of all sorts, and
> may have if not better-looking, or at least faster ways to do things that
> are long to tune and render in POV (like volumetrics or soft shadows).
> They have built-in animation capabilities, while animation in POV is
> basically scripting the changes between frames and then reparsing each
> frame.
>
> G.
>
>
> Luciano Pennini wrote:
>
> > Hello!
> >     I'd like to know if anybody can point me the differences between pov
> > and comercial packages like 3ds, softimage, etc.  I'm talking 'bout the
> > renderer capabilities, not the fact that the other programs have a
> > graphical interfase and pov doesn't.
> >
> >     Best Regards
> >     Luciano Pennini
>

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