Hello folks!

First of all, some precisions:
Lightflow is not the renderer intergrated to Max... that is Lightscape.
Virtualight is, as far as I know, developed by one person only -Stephane Marty-
Why not something like Max's system?
It has a really good internal renderer
Max has a lot of third party rendering systems, some not specifically designed for Max (Virtualight, Mental Ray, even Lightflow), and some dedicated to it (Vray, Brazil)
This offers each user the possibillity to choose what suits the best his needs.
Blender could take huge benefits through this architecture.
The internal renderer could be improved, Jandro could have a look at it (his probably doing it at the moment : ) - he's got a good base. I don't want to force him though. hehe!
I do beleive users shouldn't be restricted to one renderer and that one only. My choice would be, if I were a coder (i just code on Casio calcs...), or even a project manager, to dramatically improve the internal renderer and to create a full interface allowing total interaction between blender and the plugins, so that plugin renderers aren't limited (this way, the renderer could even add new features INTO blender through the interface (Api is the word for it i think))
well anyway!
Blender is great!
But not as great as it will be soon!

Cheers!
Dani

You can get Povray for IRIX 6.5.* from http://freeware.sgi.com. I've used it for about a year now along with Jan Waltens scripts. It's also available for Linux and there's some front-ends for it too lurking around on the web.

I'd like to see Povanim intergrated into Blender as it's by far the best exporter-to-render there is, but it's only for windows. Virtual Light produces some beautiful images, I'm positive they're going to charge big bucks for it sooner or later. Povray support would be great and it does prevent us re-inventing the wheel. Maybe in Blender V3 we could have a new renderer with the ability to create shaders, but Povray will do for now.

Sedgetone

Quote:

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

lightflow is quite fast under linux, and lightflow is quite fast even under windows if you configure it properly. tweak ts seetting and you can halve your render time or even better.

Quote:

YafRAY looks very very promising

Yes, it does!, but yafray also seems to have stopped its development while blender opened up. I'm sure that as soon as blender starts developing a more extensive way to link a renderer, they'll start coding that stuff on their end as well.

sedgetone wrote:

I'd like to see Povanim intergrated into Blender as it's by far the best exporter-to-render there is, but it's only for windows. Sedgetone

Hi,

If it is my ( ) " povanim", this script is compatible with all nt and
posix systems and you don't need python's extended libs just the blender's
one. It is not an evolution of povexport but a new original script written
from scratch.

So you can export file on winnt,win95/98/2000/xp and linux (tested with
megapov07 and povray3.5) , irix (there is a megapov07 version for this
system but exportation wasn't tested yet).

regards

Open source is definitely the way to go. I don't even think you can integrate a proprietary system into an open one

Quote:

lightflow is quite fast under linux, and lightflow is quite fast even under windows if you configure it properly. tweak ts seetting and you can halve your render time or even better.

(150 hours on 1600 * 1200) / 2 = still 75 hours which is to long imo.

jms wrote:

Hi, If it is my ( ) " povanim", this script is compatible with all nt and posix systems and you don't need python's extended libs just the blender's one. It is not an evolution of povexport but a new original script written from scratch.

Well jms it's a great bit of work

I've not checked your site for a while and povanim has improved a lot from when I last downloaded it. It would be great though to have it as a build in function rather than an add on. Keep up the great work

Sedgetone

sedgetone wrote:

You can get Povray for IRIX 6.5.* from http://freeware.sgi.com. ... Sedgetone

Did you try megapov07 on IRIX?
http://convent.nci.nih.gov/~web/glr/glrhome.html
_________________
Zoo-3D.Blender, Ze French-Speaking Community SKB My french book about Blender.

then why bother with a raytracer at all? If you're going to create a scene with insane render-settings, or whatever, then it's going to render at a speed which is quite crapulent. I've gotten quite acceptable times on quite complex scenes after tuning.

my mech spider took less than an hour at 800x600,

I couldn't render at higher cause i ran out of VM and diskspace but that's my fault.

jms wrote:

Did you try megapov07 on IRIX? http://convent.nci.nih.gov/~web/glr/glrhome.html

Wow!!!! How did I miss out on this for so long, that's made my life alot easier.

Cheers jms

Sedgetone

Quote:

then why bother with a raytracer at all? If you're going to create a scene with insane render-settings, or whatever, then it's going to render at a speed which is quite crapulent. I've gotten quite acceptable times on quite complex scenes after tuning.

I'm probably just not experienced enough with Lightflow, but I've always had the feeling that it is very slow, and that renderers like virtualight and povray are much faster.
So maybe you would help me pointing out some things that affect rendering time the most.

I've found a geneous tool (for Windows only ): Crossroads. Simply save your files as Vrml and then convert it to e.g. Pov-Ray-Format.

Hi all

Precision.......Virtualight is not a freeware...read the license


cheers

I'm a long time-povray user, I held semnars and conferences about it. On the other side I am a newbie to Blender.

Blender export to povray, or anyway controlling povray from blender, would be great. But PoVray would be an alternative for sophisticated images, I will be always slower than the internal renderer.

dittohead wrote:

the flaws... no unix support no solaris support no irix support although most folks DON'T use any of these oses some do.

PoVray exists for every imaginable platform I heard of. I compiled it under AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, NetBSD, macos, macos-x and have heard about it running happily on irix, linux, amiga, windows, dos....

I even have aporoject about being able to make a cluster of non-uniform workstations to set up a renderfarm with povray, but there are stil several problems to be solved before even trying to code.

-multix

I don't know why you talk about lightflow and BMRT? Both programs are dead! POV-Ray is still under development (and it will be for the future) and I think you can build it on nearly every platform.

Because of the fact that povanim is the only Python script wich work really perfect for me (no problems with Linux, independent from external Python system), there's actually no need for an integration.

To be honest: without this script I wouldn't use Blender anymore, 'cause I don't like Blenders scanline renderer.

Anyway, I found some bugs in the latest povanim script while I'm working on my Lamborghini Diablo images.

Regards,
Xtra