For all the slowest/realistic renderers that Blender supports, including
Kerkythea, Luxrender, Yafaray, Indigo, Maxwell, which one has the least setup
options? In other words, the material parameters are few (whilst still covering
most lighting phenomena - i.e. path tracing realism), and where the final setup
is minimal or nonexistent.

Actually, if anyone could help score out of 10 in each of the 5 attributes below
for each of the above five renderers (10/10 is always better than 0/10), I would
be very grateful. Even guess work would be great:

* Speed (more = better)

* Realism and the amount of light phenomena reproduced (more = better)

* Number of parameters for materials (more = worse, apart from any that are
absolutely essential to obtaining all/most light phenomena and material types)

* Number of parameters for final render (more = worse, apart from no-brainer
options like ticking off/on shadows, direct illumination, or wireframe mode)

* Cost (more = worse)

My bias goes towards the last four, rather than speed. I want something that
reproduces all or most lighting phenomena, but which is extremely easy to
setup. Speed is no issue at all.

Finally, can any of the renderers (and even Blender itself) handle isosurfaces?

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I have a few forum windows open in my browser Opera at the moment, and I've just
realised I posted to the wrong forum. Apologies to all. I'd delete the message
if I could.

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> For all the slowest/realistic renderers that Blender supports, including
> Kerkythea, Luxrender, Yafaray, Indigo, Maxwell, which one has the least setup
> options? In other words, the material parameters are few (whilst still covering
> most lighting phenomena - i.e. path tracing realism), and where the final setup
> is minimal or nonexistent.
> 
> Actually, if anyone could help score out of 10 in each of the 5 attributes below
> for each of the above five renderers (10/10 is always better than 0/10), I would
> be very grateful. Even guess work would be great:
> 
> * Speed (more = better)
> 
> * Realism and the amount of light phenomena reproduced (more = better)
> 
> * Number of parameters for materials (more = worse, apart from any that are
> absolutely essential to obtaining all/most light phenomena and material types)
> 
> * Number of parameters for final render (more = worse, apart from no-brainer
> options like ticking off/on shadows, direct illumination, or wireframe mode)
> 
> * Cost (more = worse)
> 
> My bias goes towards the last four, rather than speed. I want something that
> reproduces all or most lighting phenomena, but which is extremely easy to
> setup. Speed is no issue at all.
> 
> Finally, can any of the renderers (and even Blender itself) handle isosurfaces?
> 
> 
I don't think that ANY of those support isosurfaces at all. You'll need 
to convert your isosurfaces into meshes.
In fact, they probably can't take a POV-Ray source file and render it.
Those modeler/renderer are essentialy mesh/polygon based.

Price: you can have Blender for free.
I don't know for the others.


Alain

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twinbee wrote:

> My bias goes towards the last four, rather than speed. I want something that
> reproduces all or most lighting phenomena, but which is extremely easy to
> setup. Speed is no issue at all.

Sounds like McPOV might be worth a look for you (assuming the pov
export also works with this povray variant). It should give you good
light effects with few parameters when willing to wait long enough.

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