> I guess POV-Ray is pretty much a dying technology at this point. I have
> no idea what the cool kids are using these days; probably some
> GPU-accelerated polygon renderer with global light transport.

I used to use POV a lot for rendering CAD models that I had generated 
elsewhere. Now we bought software called "KeyShot" at work, the ease and 
speed that you can create photorealistic renders and animations is 
insane. I can create a 2 minute animation of various parts going 
together in an assembly in the same time it would take me to get a still 
image set up (camera angles, materials, lighting etc) in POV.

> It's a shame there isn't something modern that has a scene description
> language like the SDL. But then again, if you actually have the talent
> to model stuff, what do you need SDL for?

And if you have the talent to program, why use SDL? Recently I've been 
writing a C#/OpenGL Mandelbulb animation renderer. It runs about 30 fps 
(which lets you fly around in realtime to setup the image), but I 
average 100 frames together and write that out for high quality 
anti-aliased and focal-blurred frames. Eventually I want to come up with 
some method of recording the path you fly through with the mouse 
control, then do some processing on the path (eg to smooth it out and 
add correct focal distance) and then use that path to record frames for 
a high quality animation. All with approx 0% CPU usage, so I could be 
running POV at the same time :-)

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