Severi Salminen <sev### [at] notthissaunalahtifiinvalid> wrote:
> I waited 3 hours for a small refractive sphere to get drawn on my screen
> back in the 90s. I can wait the same 3 hours now to get true global
> illumination, caustics and other very important effects of light and I
> can be 100% certain that the result is accurate.

  Am I incorrect if I get the impression that these unbiased renderers
offer nothing else than unbiased rendering? In other words, even the
simplest of scenes will take hours to look ungrainy, no matter what
you do?

  Sometimes I use POV-Ray to get simple 3D-looking graphics for diverse
things. The big advantage is that I can do it easily and POV-Ray renders
it very fast. We are talking about a few seconds even for large-sized
images. It would be completely counter-productive to have to wait for
hours for a simple image to look non-grainy, when all you want is something
quick which looks "cool" and "3D'ish".

  For this reason even if POV-Ray in the future supports unbiased rendering,
it should always be an *alternative* method of rendering, not the only
available one. Removing the current phongshading-based rendering would be
a setback in many areas. After all, POV-Ray is not *always* used for
physical simulations of reality.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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