Fa3ien <fab### [at] yourshoesskynetbe> wrote:

> > However, it has always been stressed that povray -- like Renderman, Mental
> > Ray and other renderers -- deals exclusively with the rendering process.
>
> That's a fundamental misconception.  POV-Ray ISN'T a "renderer".
> POV-Ray is, and has alwas been, a "rendering system", complete out of
> the box, with the ability to generate scenes through a scripting
> system (until POV 2.2), then a more complete SDL (from POV 3).
>
> With Mental Ray, you can't do that, you need a modeler with an interface
> to control it.
>
> Even with Renderman, you can't created decent scenes with a text file,
> it totally lacks any feature that would allow text-based modelling.

renderer, rendering system... what's the difference?  They accept an image
model as input and produce an image as output, that's all.

What's the difference if that image model is binary mesh and textures
format, a compiled C/C++ program or an ASCII textual SDL script model?
Each has their pros and cons... certainly the SDL appeals to programmers,
though not much to people used to visual modelling tools.  And its more
true today than at povray's heyday.

The point is that Renderman and Mental Ray don't come with their own VISUAL
modeller GUI.  Instead, they ship as plugins for the most common commercial
Visual Modellers, like Maya or 3DStudioMax... they too, despite backed by
heavy ammounts of money and developers, chose to do what they do best:
rendering, leaving visual modelling to others.  Why should povray with its
limited pool of developers do differently?

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