Gilles Tran wrote:
> Now here's something that has been bothering me for a while. The current 
> generation of commercial renderers (the Vray/finalRender types, not the 
> unbiaised types like Maxwell or FryRender) are, as far as I know, 
> evolutions of POV-Ray-like renderers, i.e. basically raytracers with GI 
> on top. However, they are extremely fast and are able to produce 
> artifact-free GI images, typically for design and architectural 
> visualisations where light calculations must be very accurate, even for 
> complex models. One can throw a lot at them (area lights of any shape, 
> blurred reflection/refraction, real focal blur, displacement mapping 
> etc.) and they still perform very well, and users obtain fast and smooth 
> results. Of course, these renderers are all mesh-based.
> The question is: is using mesh geometry the only way to get this kind of 
> speed, and is POV-Ray's unique ability to deal with mathematical 
> representations a limitation here?

It is more a question of research and necessity: If you go through 
literature and i.e SIGGRAPH proceedings, you will find that most research 
deals with meshes only because implementation is just easy when you have to 
deal only with triangles (and all their neat mathematical properties). So 
even if better alternatives exist, in many cases meshes are used just 
because meshes are quick to implement and "commonly" used...

	Thorsten

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