On 2010-12-13 15:42, optima wrote:
> So the question is how do you compare povray to vray in/on any scale you choose?

Well, after looking at the feature list for vray and sample renders, a 
few obvious things stand out:

1) vray has a bigger library of good looking textures, where the stock 
povray textures are, well, lacking. It seems that most good artists here 
create their own or use what others post on the newsgroups or websites. 
This leads to more ability to make custom looks in povray, but at the 
expense of a considerable amount of time and requires that you have some 
expertise yourself.

2) vray has GPU acceleration. I know the official stance here is that 
povray needs to work with double instead of float, but nowadays CUDA 
allows for that (at reduced speed) and really, there probably are places 
in the scene where floats would work fine.

3) I'd assume vray has more efficient "SDL parsing" or their version of 
it, because they mention reusable things for animations and the like. 
POV-Ray speed can be increased considerably by unrolling loops, that 
should tell you something (besides that it's an interpreted language). 
The whole bit with opening an included file every time you call 
something inside it also is a negative for pov in the speed department, 
but allows for more powerful macros.

4) vray advertises motion blur, bokeh on DoF, ... All things that _can_ 
be done with povray but require someone to write macros.

Overall, I'd say that their main strength is the stock selection of 
materials and textures and the like, with a boost from (advertised) 
real-time rendering by using GPUs.
POV-Ray's strength in comparison is the lack of "hacks" to speed things 
up such as ambient occlusion, instead focusing on providing an 
"accurate" image for what you want. It may be slower, but it's more 
physically realistic if you get your parameters correct.

If one wants to say the adage "you get what you pay for", well, I'm 
getting a heck of a better cost/results ratio from povray than I would 
get from vray! If I were doing professional work I'd probably be using 
one of the commercial packages for the reason that I'd be paying someone 
else to spend the time to make the materials and tracer so I would only 
have to spend time on the modeling itself, but I'm not.

That's really what it boils down to, what's the value of your time? I 
would posit that given enough experience and time a good artist could 
get an image from povray that would look as if not more realistic than 
one from vray, but it might take quite a while.

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