Fa3ien <fab### [at] yourshoesskynetbe> wrote:
> > renderer, rendering system... what's the difference?
>
> A renderer comes at the end of the creative process, changing
> tons of triangles and various directives into a good-looking
> image.
>
> A rendering system INCLUDES the creative process.
>
> 3DS Max PLUS Mental Ray is a rendering system.
>
> POV-Ray is a rendering system on its own.

Yes, you can take ages to produce a very high quality pure-SDL scene in
povray using nothing but CSG or isosurfaces and no characters.  Or, like
Gilles stressed, you can do it much more fluidly, easily and faster with an
interactive GUI-based modeller with real-time visualization.

In that sense, the SDL is a very poor modelling solution and it makes povray
a very limited "rendering system".  But it is a pretty good renderer anyway.

> Some years ago, there was some hype about a new raytracer that
> did caustics. I can't find its name anymore, please, if someone
> remembers...  It was in fact a bunch of C++ libraries, and you
> had to write a C++ program to setup a scene and get an image...
> Of course, it attracted 1 or 2 geeks, allowed its programmer
> to get a good job somewhere (maybe), and is now forgotten.

next you'll tell me the pure SDL scene writers out there are not geeks...
like the chemical geek rendering molecules out of matlab and SDL...

> If POV-Ray becomes a simple renderer, just good enough to be the queue
> of Blender or whatever other stuff, it might as well be stopped. There
> are plenty of good pure renderers out there, POV-Ray must be something
> different.

It is something different:  a renderer with the most simple, flexible and
accessible input format.

why stop something which works well?

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