>> 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.
>
> Yeah, I suspect anything GPU-powered is going to out-strip POV-Ray by
> many orders of magnitude. Indeed, there are WebGL demos that do stuff
> *in a web browser* that would take months to render in POV-Ray! (Trouble
> is, as I discovered, rendering an entire scene as a single monolithic
> shader doesn't scale beyond a few objects.)

KeyShot doesn't use the GPU, it is CPU based. But I assume it is 
massively optimised for triangle-mesh rendering - it converts the CAD 
models to meshes (at your requested accuracy level) when you import 
them. The main point is that anyone in my team can pick up how to use 
that software pretty much intuitively, imagine giving someone POV and a 
copy of slp2pov for the first time and asking them to produce a 
photo-realistic animation!

> The OpenGL API is huge, complex, and mostly undocumented. It's also
> extremely imperative. And you can't debug it. (I did see a while back a
> rather amusing page listing 35 different ways to accidentally render a
> completely black image...)

The only bit of OpenGL I use is to draw two big triangles that cover the 
screen. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do that online and it's 
relatively simple. All the clever stuff is done in the shader used for 
those two triangles.

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