No, this is not about the next version of POV-Ray..or maybe a little :)

I was looking at WinOSi homepage (http://www.winosi.onlinehome.de/) and 
it seems to be a very interesting raytracing program. It is basically a 
true forward raytracing engine: it shoots rays from light sources to the 
scene - not the opposite as in many other renderes like POV-Ray, for 
example. At least looking at the gallery it seems to be able to produce 
some very realistic looking effects without any "faking" or tricks. 
There is also no need to tweak tens of different settings to be able to 
produce the desired output. You just set the scene and let the engine 
render the image. The image quality gets better all the time as more 
rays are calculated and it is up to the user to decide when the desired 
quality has been reached.

The downside of all this is of course speed: it takes quite long for 
WinOSi to produce good quality image even from a simple scene. But the 
speed is not unbearable considering the quality and accuracy of the 
images. Actually similar quality might be even slower to achieve using 
backward raytracers.

I just began to wonder how other people thinks about the future of 
POV-Ray. Has there been any thoughts of turning POV-Ray into a true 
forward raytracer or are there issues (others than maybe rendering 
speed) that makes it unfeasible? That might also make the code a lot 
simpler as there would be no need for separate algorithms for photon 
mapping, radiosity, anti-aliasing, specular highlights, color 
dispersion, light sources, area/point lights etc. Not to mention the 
simpler scene description files. WinOSi also seems to be very easily 
parallelized. Or is the speed difference still so big that the extra 
quality is not worth it?

BTW, are there forward renderes other than WinOSi available?

Severi S.

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