Hi all,

below a scene I started some days ago inspired by the portal doc of 
luxrender (luxrender.net), a really nice GPL render engine. While 
waiting for the result calculated by luxrender, I planned to port it to 
POVRay and compare the result, see yourself.

Here my 2 cents to the differences:

Luxrender:
+ Very realistic results.
+ Nice blender integration (other commercial suites too).
+ Imho good developer activity.
+ Adjust lighting during rendering !!!!
+ Easy scaling using active network interface, can add render nodes on 
the fly (which is really needed, see below :-)).
- Damn long render times.

POVRay:
+ Endless possibilities due to the SDL and windows frontend. I like to 
have full control using text files (I'm a software developer).
+ Nice control to scale render time (Comment out parts, use flags to 
scale quality, ...).
+ Easy way to enhance scene by scripting.
+ Working on ultra complex scenes even on ultra slow machines, text rules :)
- Development seems a bit slow (no critic!, just a bit frustating).
- Some issues I can't handle (Can be seen in the POV-render (the second 
one below)), maybe some POVray pro can tell me how to circumvent them:
   - Areas with bad anti-alias, sometimes, even with really high AA 
settings (see edges in the top right area).
   - Areas which have no direct lighting do not show any normal effects 
(All walls have bumps, but this can be seen behind the plant only).

At the end, I like both and I will investigate more time in both engines 
(others too).

Some values:
Luxrender image: The scene was rendered 8 hours on an Athlon 3800 X2, 
both cores, I've then added 2 Athlon 4850 dual core plus one Sempron 
3000, so it renders 6 additional hours on 7 cores (my complete home 
network).

POVRay image: 2.5 hours on the Athlon 3800 X2, both cores (3.7 beta 33).

Please leave some comments :-)

hobBIT

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'luxroom_comp.jpg' (688 KB)

Preview of image 'luxroom_comp.jpg'