>> For whatever reason, it seems everybody is slowly drifting away from
>> here. (I guess because POV-Ray is becoming less popular; IDK.)
>
> It is an interesting question indeed. What is the relationship between a
> 'less popular' POV-Ray (that is another question of course) and fewer
> visits to p.o-t?

As you say, it's an interesting one. Hypothetically there should be no 
relationship, but...

> but what we seem to see is
> number of POV-Ray images /and/ o-t visits going down. I wonder about the
> production of images with other programs: do they show the same trend?

It seems to be like POV-Ray is becoming obsolete - much like the vibrant 
FractInt community I used to inhabit. In it's day, FractInt was the 
daddy. No end of other programs quoted FractInt compatibility as a 
feature - because it had the best speed and by far the most options and 
best documentation of anything you could get.

Nobody uses FractInt anymore.

(Boot into MS-DOS to run it? Only uses one core? Only supports standard 
VGA screen-modes? What do you mean "limited to 640KB RAM"? Why do I have 
to use the "disk rendering" option to render anything bigger than 
1024x768? Why does it only have 18-bit colour?!? Why can I only load and 
save files in GIF format? Why is the user interface in text-mode? Why do 
have the screen-modes not work on my nVidia 280 GTX? What is "Tandy Video"?)

I feel POV-Ray may be succumbing to this as well. I still use POV-Ray (I 
have three instances running right now, in fact). But its radiosity mode 
takes *hours* to render anything at high-quality. And the other day I 
saw a demo of a renderer that runs IN A FREAKING WEB-BROWSER and uses an 
unbiased render running on the GPU to recreate the same effect as 
POV-Ray in *seconds* rather than days.

It seems diffuse inter-reflection is the big thing these days.

I still use POV-Ray, because
1. I haven't found any other program that can render shapes that aren't 
polygon meshes.
2. I haven't found any other program that can render textures that 
aren't bitmaps.
3. I haven't found anything else that's scriptable like POV-Ray is.

To most people, such considerations are probably moot. But to a 
mathematician like me...

Also, I have to drawing talent. All I can do is construct interesting 
functions and hope that graphing them does something entertaining.

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