John D. Gwinner wrote:
> Folks:
> 
>   I'm thinking of getting a comercial modeler and possibly renderer. 
> Currently, I have student status due to talking a UCLA writing course 
> extension.
> 
>   It's a lot, but I could possibly afford 3DSMax, and I have to say I'm 
> tempted.
> 
>   However, I like POVRayy's rendering so I'm wondering what moving to a 
> comercial package would give me, or more accuratly, what' I'd lose.
> 
>   Do any of them do procedural texturing?

Most high level commercial renderers do support procedural textures of 
some sort - if they are as easy to use and flexible as in POV-Ray is a 
different topic.

What you will loose in nearly all cases is the ability to render any not 
triangle based shapes.  For a lot of people this does not seem a 
disadvantage but for quite a lot of situations it is.

Other things you would loose:

- the ability to use your software on any platform (and not just the 
ones supported by the software officially).

- the ability to customize your renderer, adding new features, fixing bugs.

- the scripting language - other packages offer scripting abilities as 
well but not all and not necessarily as well and intuitively usable as 
in POV-Ray.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/

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