> Concerning landscapes - i have seen and rendered far more complex
> landscapes with POV-Ray than you usually see being made with scanline
> renderers.  I really wonder if you could show me a landscape render you
> could say 'this would not have been possible in POV-Ray because of the
> detailed geometry'.

Fair enough. I submit the following picture:
http://www.daylongraphics.com/products/leveller/tour/ss_scanline.jpg

It contains almost 17 million triangles. The rocky lumps
in the foreground were drawn using a fractal cube geometry
insertion. The rest of the ground is done using fractal
displacement subdivision. There is no bumpmapping; every
lighting effect is done with actual geometry.

Not only would fitting that many triangles bog down
my PC, it is not even what I consider a large scene;
others have contained over a billion triangles.

The argument then is often "Oh, you could organize
your geometry better, or use bumpmaps". But as an artist,
I often find it's easier to create certain effects
by generating lots of geometry. And bumpmapping just
really isn't the equal of displacement shading, in the end.
To me, computers should be in the service of people,
to do things so that people can work the way they prefer.


> And AFAIK there has not been a serious effort to implement scanline
> rendering in POV-Ray.  Technically this will be next to impossible because
> a lot of features of POV-Ray are not compatible to scanline rendering
> techiques.  One try that has been made some time ago can be found on:
>
> http://www.kfunigraz.ac.at/imawww/thaller/wolfgang/vop-intro.html

Thanks, I'll have a look.

I'm not worried about feature non-support
as much as whether the renderer is available at all.
The goal of supporting every primitive type,
every option, etc. is laudable but I see it
as something that can be grown towards.

Ray

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