Severi Salminen wrote:

> This is exactly what I don't like in POV. You can't just throw a scene to it and
> let it render it accurately. You have to enable many kind of features and you
> have to guess which features your scene actually needs. POV can't decide it for
> you.

This is what I don't like about GPUs and scanline rendering. Everything 
is textured polygons; the rest is lashings and lashings of deceptive 
trickery to make it *look* like the real thing. But with POV-Ray, if I 
ask for a sphere, I get a sphere. Not some polygon mesh approximating a 
sphere, but AN ACTUAL SPHERE. You can construct shapes of arbitrary 
complexity. Surfaces and textures can be magnified arbitrarily and never 
look pixellated. Reflections JUST WORK. Refraction JUST WORKS. Etc.

I can certainly see the advantage of a "I just throw objects in and it 
works" approach to lighting. But then, that's more or less how POV-Ray's 
radiosity feature works. You usually don't have to twiddle the settings 
all *that* much - it's more a question of how many years you're willing 
to wait for the result. And that's the kind of worrying part - how many 
years will you have to wait for the result from an unbiased renderer?

(OTOH, the fast preview you can get sounds like a useful feature. Ever 
wait 6 hours for a render only to find out that actually it looks lame? 
It's not funny...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
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