47bc9c10$1@news.povray.org...

> If you buy top hardware, model, texture, and drop accurate lighting in 
> your scene, PoV can do it, too.
> The trick is the accurate lighting.  It's not impossible to do in PoV.

Unfortunately, it is.

POV can do a lot of things, but there are many common lighting situations 
that are just out of reach from a practical point of view. It's not just the 
lighting model, but also the texturing model that is insufficient.

When I was busy playing with POV, the key to get good images was to 
precisely to avoid these kind of lighting/texturing situations. There are 
things that POV sucks at rendering unless one spends a lot of time trying to 
find workarounds (or brushing off artifacts...).

The area_illumination feature that Warp introduced in the latest 3.7 beta is 
one of those things that the previous versions couldn't do: of course one 
could simulate it with grids of point lights, but it was just too 
impractical for common usage. Another feature that is sorely missing is 
efficient blurred reflection. There's a trick to do that in POV but the 
results are usable in only certain (limited) circumstances. In modern 
renderers, blurred reflection can be applied to all the materials in the 
scene, thus allowing correct specularity and (inter-)reflections, and this 
adds tremendously to realism.
The beauty of using more advanced renderers (biased or unbiased) is that 
those blocks no longer exist, either because the results are accurate from 
the start (unbiased) or because they are lots of optimisations for speed 
(biased). Just describe accurately your lights and materials, and the system 
works out of the box.

G.


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