From what I learnt reading material here and there (no direct experience),
it seems that the main difference is that commercial packages are usually
not ray-tracers. They use faster rendering algorithms and use ray-tracing
only when it's necessary. Therefore they seem to have much shorter rendering
times. Other differences I can think of :
They rely on meshes and not on 3D primitives, which permits non-linear
transformations (POV of course also supports meshes so it's possible to do
so, see the Warp/Colefax mesh macros).
They seem to rely on lots of optimizations and "tricks" of all sorts, and
may have if not better-looking, or at least faster ways to do things that
are long to tune and render in POV (like volumetrics or soft shadows).
They have built-in animation capabilities, while animation in POV is
basically scripting the changes between frames and then reparsing each
frame.

G.


Luciano Pennini wrote:

> Hello!
>     I'd like to know if anybody can point me the differences between pov
> and comercial packages like 3ds, softimage, etc.  I'm talking 'bout the
> renderer capabilities, not the fact that the other programs have a
> graphical interfase and pov doesn't.
>
>     Best Regards
>     Luciano Pennini

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