>   You have verified what many other people have discovered - that the
> raytraced output of freeware POV-Ray can be superior to high-dollar
> commercial software. Thank you for this revelation.

Not necessarily, but a huge sight faster ;)  You've got to remember that
you're not just paying for a renderer with MAX, you're paying for an
animation system, IK, NURBS modeller, network renderer, full modelling
environment (spacewarps, grids, realtime zoom, real time
pan/roll/camera/shaded preview), real time render testing, video post
effects system, non-linear motion editor etc.

Being able to model something visually is worth everything to a professional
modeller, otherwise it just takes too much time!

The new MAX R3 I hate to say whips POV-Ray in rendering quality if used
right, MAX R2.5 is still about even with it I think (in the raytracing
section anyway, and MAX is a huge amount faster in the scanliner).

It's just a shame that POV-Ray can't do specific lighting or translucency or
I'd render to it all the time (the specific lighting is especially hard to
get around, I use it all the time now)

Also, the textures in MAX can far beat the textures in POV-Ray, having the
ability to control ambient, bump, diffuse, reflection, refraction,
displacement, shininess, ior, self-illumination etc all directly by ANY map
type (bitmap, precedural, multi-layer, real time capture etc) is great for
fine-tuning and making very detailed textures.

The real point in this is:

TIME... sure, someone could render an image just as good in POV-Ray as in
MAX, but it would take soooo much longer to design that image in POV-Ray
than it would in MAX, and time is of the essence with all professional
graphic artists.  That's what you're paying for with MAX, ease of use and
power in modelling.

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