Eitan Tal wrote:

> sorry for being a little Anti-Povray, but its a lot easier to work with 3d
> studio max
> and then convert it into povray.

POV-Ray is not a modeler; it is a ray tracer.  It is very good at what
it does: converting text input files into 2-D graphics output files. 
Other programs can be used to generate text input files for POV-Ray, and
that's part of what makes POV-Ray useful.  The chief usefulness of
POV-Ray - or any ray tracer - is the quality of the output it produces. 
If you don't care so much about image quality, you may well want to go
with a faster method than ray tracing, regardless of your budget.  If
you need the combination of modeler and high-quality renderer, it makes
sense to use an external modeler (3DS & whatever conversion software,
Moray, YourFavoriteTextEditor & graph paper, whatever) to create files
for use by POV-Ray.  POV-Ray makes no claims of being a Swiss Army
knife.  If you complain that POV-Ray isn't a modeler, you're right.

POV-Ray has other advantages over some other software (cost, access to
source code, cross-platform nature).  That can't be said of most
modelers, with the possible exception of YourFavoriteTextEditor.  Since
most modelers are not cross-platform (as they generally depend heavily
on platform-specific graphics libraries), it makes sense to have the
modelers vary with platform but have a unified cross-platform back end. 
If you create a scene file for the IRTC using Moray and POV-Ray, other
people on PPC Mac's or SPARC's can render your file.  That's not true of
most modelers, except when their output can be converted to POV-Ray
format. ;-)

Has anyone released a modified version of 3DS that will run on
clusters?  Ray tracing as an algorithm is well suited to parallel
architecture.  Modelers can better use pipelined graphics hardware that
POV-Ray can't.  Yet another reason to separate renderers and modelers.

If you want a modeler that shares the advantages of POV-Ray of cost,
access to source code, and cross-platform nature (pick as many of those
as you like to consider important), you might offer to help with any one
of the ongoing 3-D modeler projects out there.  I'm sure Ken has some
links. ;-)

-- 
Mark Gordon
mtg### [at] povrayorg

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