I don't know a word about povray. I just use XSI and Maya in my very little
studio and don't want to buy more mental ray very expensive licenses,
especially when I dream of building a renderfarm of my own. I was wondering
how easy or difficult it is to use povray as my main renderer (is it even
possible?) and leave mental ray behind.

Also, I know there must be lots of povray fans here, but, honestly, how does
it compare to mental ray? (I believe mental ray makes beautiful pictures).
What would be the caveats and drawbacks if any? And the advantages?

Thanks for your replies.

Regards,

CM

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comomolo wrote:
> I don't know a word about povray. I just use XSI and Maya in my very little
> studio and don't want to buy more mental ray very expensive licenses,
> especially when I dream of building a renderfarm of my own. I was wondering
> how easy or difficult it is to use povray as my main renderer (is it even
> possible?) and leave mental ray behind.
> 
> Also, I know there must be lots of povray fans here, but, honestly, how does
> it compare to mental ray? (I believe mental ray makes beautiful pictures).
> What would be the caveats and drawbacks if any? And the advantages?
> 
> Thanks for your replies.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> CM
> 
> 
> 
> 
For the geometry you can try PoseRay. It reads OBJ, 3DS, LWO, DXF and 
RAW and exports to POV-Ray code for rendering. It does not import Maya 
or XSI lights or camera (yet).

PoseRay -> user.txcyber.com/~sgalls/

good luck,

FlyerX

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comomolo wrote:
> I don't know a word about povray. I just use XSI and Maya in my very little
> studio and don't want to buy more mental ray very expensive licenses,
> especially when I dream of building a renderfarm of my own. I was wondering
> how easy or difficult it is to use povray as my main renderer (is it even
> possible?) and leave mental ray behind.

That's a question next to impossible to answer for someone who does not 
know the details of your work.  It is a bit like asking "is a motorboat 
a good replacement for a car?".

A few facts you might not yet know:

- POV-Ray is a standalone program and not a plugin renderer.  For using 
it you will need to write POV-Ray scenes or get/write a tool that 
generates POV-Ray scenes from your Maya/whatever scenes.

- While common plugin renderers usually only render triangle meshes 
POV-Ray supports a lot of other shapes as well.  This offers a lot of 
possibilities but also means POV-Ray supports no techniques that only 
work on meshes.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 23 Sep. 2004 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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> For the geometry you can try PoseRay.

For the textures you can give PovMAN ( 
http://www.aetec.ee/fv/vkhomep.nsf/pages/povman2 ) a try. It allows to 
use Renderman shaders in POV-Ray. It has some limitations though (e.g. 
there's no support for surface derivatives (du,dv) so it won't work with 
antialiased shaders or cartoon shaders). AFAIK there's no support for 
reference geometry as well.
To be honest, I doubt that POV-Ray can be used in your setup. POV-Ray 
can render beautiful images and it's a cool renderer with some very nice 
features, but it's also incompatible to most modelers and other renderes 
out there (free or commercial).

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