Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> 
>> David Buck wrote:
>>
>>> Very strange.  When POV-Ray was first written, there were no .obj, 
>>> .mdl or .3ds formats.  POV-Ray used its own format which developed 
>>> into a sophisticated programming language for scene design.  Because 
>>> of this design, we are able to do amazing things with POV-Ray which 
>>> can't be done with traditional scanline algorithms working on polygon 
>>> meshes. The results can be breath-taking and are IMHO unrivaled in 
>>> the scanline world.
>>
>>
>> Even Pixar's renderer turns to ray-tracing for some of its effects.
> 
> I thought it was all raytraced, at least for the final scenes.

Ray tracing was added to their renderer for Cars.  Up until then their 
renderer was a z-buffer thingy.  Even now the ray-tracing is only used 
for shading reflective surfaces and ambient occlusion.  The ray-tracing 
is only used to trace objects near the reflective surface (for 
performance reasons); objects beyond that distance are represented using 
environment maps.  Things which are not reflective use other shading 
techniques.  Once the object is shaded it is z-buffered in regardless of 
how it was shaded.  You can find their papers at http://graphics.pixar.com

Regards,
John

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