> renderer, rendering system... what's the difference?  

A renderer comes at the end of the creative process, changing
tons of triangles and various directives into a good-looking
image.

A rendering system INCLUDES the creative process.

3DS Max PLUS Mental Ray is a rendering system.

POV-Ray is a rendering system on its own.

> They accept an image
> model as input and produce an image as output, that's all.
> 
> What's the difference if that image model is binary mesh and textures
> format, a compiled C/C++ program or an ASCII textual SDL script model?

The difference is that the SDL is a user-friendly method to design
a scene to render, with some special capabilities.

Some years ago, there was some hype about a new raytracer that
did caustics. I can't find its name anymore, please, if someone
remembers...  It was in fact a bunch of C++ libraries, and you
had to write a C++ program to setup a scene and get an image...
Of course, it attracted 1 or 2 geeks, allowed its programmer
to get a good job somewhere (maybe), and is now forgotten.

Attracting users with ease of use AND features is a requirement.

> Each has their pros and cons... certainly the SDL appeals to programmers,
> though not much to people used to visual modelling tools.  And its more
> true today than at povray's heyday.
> 
> The point is that Renderman and Mental Ray don't come with their own VISUAL
> modeller GUI.  Instead, they ship as plugins for the most common commercial
> Visual Modellers, like Maya or 3DStudioMax... they too, despite backed by
> heavy ammounts of money and developers, chose to do what they do best:
> rendering, leaving visual modelling to others.  Why should povray with its
> limited pool of developers do differently?

If POV-Ray becomes a simple renderer, just good enough to be the queue 
of Blender or whatever other stuff, it might as well be stopped. There
are plenty of good pure renderers out there, POV-Ray must be something
different.

Fabien.

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