> My scene is basically nothing more than a large number of spheres(of different
> sizes and colors) Povray works great for me for rendering an excellent high
> quality final output.
> Unfortunately there are parts in my development cycle where I need a faster
> render. Low quality acceptable. Are there any options people would recommend?

Have you tried Tachyon ... it is supplied with VMD but is a stand along
raytracer, is very fast, can handle very large numbers of objects (without the
slow scene parsing times of PovRay), if you have a cluster or HPC facility or
multiple cores it will make full use of those (threads or MPI based for
multiple cpus), etc etc. Designed I imagine for exactly what you are talking
about, fast, a raytracer, perhaps not the same quality of larger more involved
packages. It is also built as just an library so you can incorporate it into
your own code. Oh and yes, easy to write an exporter/parser for the scene file.

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