Coming from Blender I allow myself a little bump in here to share my current
feeling with + and - points about all that which is quite temporary as
everything is bound to
change:

+1  For me the main strength of POV is indeed its SDL, Because I'm surprised at
how intuitive to start using it is (much more than learning Python for a
blender user) yet I feel my eyes opening to other text based tools thanks to
it. Ok that's for the learning path. But what does it bring that we would'nt
get with another renderer:
Any defect of the exporter, you'll be able to catch back up thanks to the SDL.
For instance, my current exporter doesn't port well the procedural shaders from
blender to Pov syntax, yet some quite close translation is possible... So I add
the missing shader as Pov Code. My exporter gets in the way to manipulate some
light position? I put the light on a hidden layer and copy its coordinates to
quickly create one as Pov code to replace it... It's limitless since you can end
up typing all your scene by hand... Imagine, if only one parameter is exported,
then coupling Pov with your exporter is still worth it because it's already
optimized for hand made SDL and the little automation you add to it will only
be a plus. Thus I would'nt say that no exporter does Pov justice, but that Pov
TRANSCENDS any exporter.

+2  There are other SDL based renderers, except the features what more does it
have :) ? DOCUMENTATION!
Yes lux and Yafaray are based on PBRT, documented by a book, but it is not
really geared towards beginners. Pov's documentation is TOP NOTCH, better than
3ds max's.

+3  Pov is FEATURE RICH and has been so for so many years that it's also STABLE
For instance, If you want shapes that will never show polygons you have them
thanks to primitives If you want organic displaced surfaces that will have that
same polygon safe look, Isosurfaces are there.

-4  What about Speed? This is the price of point 3 POV is reasonably SLOW:
Slower than Yafaray, faster than Luxrender. Especially considering that in Pov
you can still bake radiosity and photons for reuse in walkthroughs.

+5  What does Pov bring that Blender Internal doesn't have?
GI! What Povray documentation calls Radiosity, is really what is reffered to
everywhere as GI, Global Illumination, (let's not be too picky about details)
Anyway, it's NOT what is referred to as Radiosity in Blender, which is applied
per vertex. We can suspect that Blender will have true GI very soon as many
test builds have had some solution or another but as of today it does not.
When it does, what will pov have that Blender might want? Again, the SDL


+6  It has charm. Have a look at the Hall of Fame pictures, forget anything else
look at the light: isn't it simply the most beautyful you ever saw in 3D
pictures?


We can't ignore render times so we have to learn Yafaray for now but we can't
ignore features and maturity and ease of use either... for me both  Yafaray and
Pov come out firsts of the current choice of renderers for blender. And after
the internal engine speedup in a few month; a little later the better
integration of Lux and Freestyle and the others, things may change...

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