47bc54c3$1@news.povray.org...
> I dunno, These types of renderers do have some interesting applications, I
> could see an architect using them to do a true physical light simulation
> on a building design, using various lighting schemes/time of day, etc..
> But for creating "photorealistic" rendered images, my bets are still on
> raytracers, they're not a physically accurate simulation, but they do a
> decent approximation.

Commercial unbiased renderers are now quite common for product design and
architecture visualisation. For a production house, it's just cheaper to add
a few CPUs (or to rent some time from a render farm) than to spend time
tweaking the GI.

Of course, the latest crop of raytracers/GI engines like Vray or FinalRender
do a fantastic job (speed + quality) but from my experience with
FinalRender - think POV-Ray on steroids - this comes with a hefty price =
dozens of abstract, often arcane parameters to speed up things and prevent
artifacts. Right now these renderers are quite perfect for most jobs
(particularly for animation where speed matters a lot) but in a few years
and some extra cores later, I can see the machines catching up with the
speed requirements of unbiased renderers. In fact, I just saw on TV a
animated commercial rendered with MaxwellRender, so the benefits of this
kind of engine are already there.

G.


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