Adam wrote:

>    So what does that leave us with? Artists who want total control over
> the scene? Computer programmers who simply want to challenge themselves?
> In other words, it seems to me that Povray has few practical
> applications, but is more of a hobby, or even a teaching device for
> understanding higher-level programs.

POV-Ray isn't much different from other ray tracers in this regard, so
I'm going to give some examples of use of other ray tracers in my
answers.

Granted, I've not heard of POV-Ray being used in the film industry or in
serious engineering applications.  Ray tracers (BMRT in particular) have
been used from time to time in the film industry (by Pixar), but quite
seldom (only a couple of shots).  I have seen ray tracers (though not
POV-Ray, and the one I'm thinking of is actually a photon-mapping
implementation, so more like MegaPov than POV-Ray) being used in
architecture.  I think ray tracing might be used for car ads once in a
while, since the reflection off car paint is hard to fake, but I don't
think they were using POV-Ray for that (something with NURBS support,
probably).

POV-Ray is certainly used by artists and hobbyists.  It can also be used
by students, since it introduces many of the major concepts in 3D
graphics.  Unlike BMRT, there isn't a commercial application built on
the same scene description language, so it's not so directly useful to
students, who often migrate from BMRT to PRMan.

FWIW, I've found that ray tracers are often written by students as an
exercise.  I'm not sure how many students over the years have gotten
credit for code that they eventually contributed to POV-Ray.

Based on support requests I've gotten (from NASA, med schools, chemistry
departments, etc.) there are some applications to scientific
visualization.  Ray tracing does a lovely job of making pictures of
spheres, and it's popular among many chemists for rendering high-quality
molecular model images.  I've seen it used to generate an animation
showing an asteroid moving in an unusual orbit.  It's sometimes used in
the computer industry in research (mostly in parallel processing) and
sales (look how fast our cluster renders skyvase.pov).

-Mark Gordon

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