I think that it would be a great idea if blender could write POVRay files.

This would be good because:
A. Blender would have a nice renderer without having to reinvent the wheel
B. PovRay would finally have a nice GUI
C. Blender would be simpler, because it wouldn't need a high-end renderer built-in

Any Comments?

the flaws...

no unix support
no solaris support
no irix support

although most folks DON'T use any of these oses some do.
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dittohead

Well I have povray compiled on Solaris 2.8, using gcc3.2, I had to do it myself from source, but it works fine.
There are also binaries for Linux. I can't speak for Irix, but I wouldn't imagine it would be too difficult to get things working.

Personally I think it would be great to have pov output from Blender.

But there are more (freeware)script based renderers that are good candidates for exporting too, such as Lightfllow and bmrt.

Last edited by Debaser on Thu Oct 17, 2002 7:10 pm; edited 1 time in total

I would prefer to use lightflow, too.

We can include Lightflow in it. Perhaps we can ask the owner/publisher of Lightflow. 3Dmax uses Lightflow, too. Because Lightflow is one of the best renders in the world.

SO why don´t we make a button (right beside material, texture and the lightbutton) where you can enable Lightflow GI, Lightflow Raytracing and such things. That would be wonderful.

Oh, well, I didn't know 3Dsmax uses Lightflow. If it's that good, I agree that we should use it. I just haven't had any experience to vouch for it, that's all. Recommending what I know...

Zweistein wrote:

Perhaps we can ask the owner/publisher of Lightflow

IMO that's not necessary, The code doesn't have to be integrated into blender, blender can just export to the native Lightflow format and make a call to the Lightflow renderer.

Lightflow is dead, programmer is gone - noone can contact him.

eeshlo says he's spoken to Japoco - and that he's a moderator on highend3d's rendering programming mailing list. I checked, he is listed there but I don't subscribe myself so I wouldn't know if he' active or not.

Today I found this nice renderer http://www.3dvirtualight.com/gallery.html also freeware offcourse and still in development.
There is even a blender export script available.

virtualight is good, too. But i think we don t have to decide wich one we use. We should write letters to all of them and then decide. SO we can look if the publisher help us with it.

The gallery definitely looks good, but I don't like the feel of the company. They probably run their website on win2k (.asp), I didn't see anything besides a windows version, and the download is password protected (come on, that's cheesy).

I'd be happy with pretty much anything, so long as it's free (as in speech, not beer). POVRay is open source, but that virtualight looks like they could go commercial any day now.

IMO, it doesn't really matter which we choose; the results will be fairly similar. The main point is just features that will ease integration, and freedom from licenses, (how cool would it be to spend time to work this into blender, only to be dropped like a pile of dung by a restrictive license?) etc.

sasKuach wrote:

POVRay is open source, but that virtualight looks like they could go commercial any day now.

I would like to make you think about something: Virtualight and Lightflow are NOT open source! They are only free for non commercial use (Virtualight costs $50 for commercial use every year). As much as I agree that the effort of making such great programs should be rewarded, I think there should be some open source raytracer included in Blender like YafRay (http://www.coala.uniovi.es/~jandro/noname/) which can be developed within the group of blender users (Jandro, the maker of YafRay is a blenderhead).

Sure, there should also be exporters for other renderers. But if I want to sell a copy of one of my pictures, I defenitly wouldn't take virtualight or lightflow for that, because of the registration fee. IMHO Blender would benefit of an internal open source raytracer.

Cheers, Tobur

I don't know about using lightflow. Lightflow is very, very slow...

YafRAY looks very very promising