Roberto Ferrer de Amorim <ram### [at] comdescontocombr> wrote:
: I'd still use POV for simple raytraced
: images, but if things get more complicated, I'd go with BMRT. Or maybe
: LightFlow

  Why? What's so much better in those than in POV-Ray?

  I haven't have the chance to test too much, but deducing from a couple of
simple tests which I was able to perform, POV-Ray is ofter much more efficient
than LightFlow (I have no idea about BMRT).


  PS: I don't know why, but it seems to be a pretty common idea that
POV-Ray is a lot slower than other raytracers. Where does this idea come
from? I have never seen any actual test showing that other raytracers were
significantly faster than POV-Ray; all the contrary: I have witnessed some
tests were POV-Ray is quite a lot faster than another raytracer (LightFlow).
  Another funny phenomenon is that when a new Raytracer is made and the
author makes a couple of test images which show the very best of this new
raytracer, then the simple fact that these images look different from
typical POV-Ray images make people think that the new raytracer is a lot
better than POV-Ray. No matter how many stunning incredibly photorealistic
images people make with POV-Ray, this phenomenon is prevalent.
  I'm not saying that there couldn't be a raytracer which has some much better
features and quality than POV-Ray; what I mean is that people are way too
eager to believe a couple of example images and circulating rumors, instead
of adopting a rational approach.

  As for scanline rendering being faster than raytracing, well, this is
completely true.
  However, the idea of the speed difference between scanline rendering and
raytracing is often very biased. Scanline renderers usually use just
triangles to define the whole scene, and people too often compare it to
POV-Ray rendering complicated primitives and CSG.
  In fact, if we give the exact same scene made of triangle meshes to POV-Ray,
most people will probably be quite suprised how fast POV-Ray renders it.
POV-Ray can be incredibly fast when rendering triangle meshes. I have gone
up to more than 30 millions of triangles in a scene, and POV-Ray renders it
in about 1 minute (800x600, antialiasing, three light sources). A scanline
renderer couldn't do much better.

-- 
#macro N(D,I)#if(I<6)cylinder{M()#local D[I]=div(D[I],104);M().5,2pigment{
rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

Post a reply to this message