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You talk of "production," which sounds like "movie," but it isn't a chump app just because movies don't use it for their render engine

Well, movies, commercials, games, TV series, student pieces... anything using 3D.

I never said it was a chump app, just that it's doubtful anyone reading is going to make a hardware decision specifically to run POVRay. While it might be used to render a the occasional 3D picture for academic purposes (i.e. no budget but needs high quality), I find it highly unlikely it's being used on several thousand, tens of thousands or million dollar farms rendering thousands of frames a day. On that scale, it would be really useful to see direct comparisons using the software people do use.

As far as price goes, considering that we had to go through 11 ad-laden pages to see their results, I'd hope the people who wrote TFA could buy a couple licenses to do tests with.

Btw, mental ray is not owned by Autodesk.

nVidia Gelato
Mental Ray taking advantage of OTS hardware
Dedicated raytracing hardware
Raytraced Quake 3
OpenRT realtime raytracing framework

Although I have been using 3D Studio since R2(I'm surprised my old P120 didn't melt. ;p~), I used to agree with this assumption until I started using Cebas Final Render. Even Mental Ray was a huge step above the default scanline renderer, although it didn't seem to integrated very well with other 3rd party plugins.

As for my own "elitist opinion", I chose to stick with 3DS Max 4.2 and Cebas Final Render for my professional work. I do a little Maya now and then, but it doesn't feel as comfortable to me.

With todays processors linux based rendering farms are really hard to beat. The two industry standard rendering programs have already been ported to linux, Mental Ray and the famous Photorealistic Renderman. On the artists side Softimage|3D 3.9 is already running on Linux. Porting XSI will be more tricky since it was developed for Wintel (it will create a fake registry in the IRIX version, you get the idea). Side FX has some products running on Linux. Maya 4.0 is also ported to Linux.
Add to this that most of those shops have developed lots of in-house tools that run on, surprise, IRIX, so porting to Linux seems a better choice than trying some acrobatic effort to make them work on Redmond's.
You want composition software? No problem, you can use NothingReal's impressive Shake
IMHO you may call those pplications which are truly useful to artists. Sure, they're damn expensive, but this is a niche market so that's not surprising.

I actually don't know if they intend to release an opensourced version of the modeller, but since the render engine was developed by Mental Images and not by them they won't be allowed to release the code.
This is also the same render engine the Softimage|XSI uses, tho in a more powerful version.

They (AVID owned Softimage team) can't even port their newest "Next-Generation 3D Animation" effort to the once SI|3D Native IRIX. Softimage|XSI 1.0 on IRIX is actually the NT version running under emulation, causing horrible slow-down and a considerable ammount of bugs. Many under valid support contracts who got their XSI "upgrades" have been most disappointed by their IRIX performance.

While TOONZ for LINUX may seem like a step in the right direction, take into consideration that TOONZ is actually developed by an R&D Company called DIGITAL VIDEO. I take this directly from the softimage.com toonz legal type:

Toonz is developed in Italy by SBP S.p.a, Itaca S.r.l. and Digital Video S.r.L. and is distributed by Softimage Co. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

So if you're expecting the Montreal team to put out anything other than buggy and non-production ready software i.e. XSI 1.0, don't hold your breath. You might get lucky with Mental Ray though, as that is also developed by a seperate company, MENTAL IMAGES.

I for one hope that Softimage can get their colletive heads out of their collective butts and jump on the cross-platform compatibility bandwagon a'la A|W's Maya. Otherwise they (or at least their 3D division) face a rapidly growing dissatisfied and defeated user base who have had enough of their lies, bull and empty promises.

-not bitter :)

No big deal.

Softimage uses a very cool renderer called mental ray and it has been available for linux for a long time.

Also Pixar's Renderman (used in Toy Story) is also available for linux.

So Maya's softimage is one of the last of the leaders of 3d animation to join linux bandwagon. It's a little a bit strange that it happened so late considering that SGI (owner of Alias|Wavefront) seems to be so committed to linux.

mental ray , the renderer that most Softimage shops use, is already ported to Linux (x86 and Alpha) as well as many other flavors of Un*x. It lets a master machine farm out tiles to worker machines and it is multithreaded (takes advantage of SMP) as well.

I just wanted to emphasize that mental ray has been available on Linux x86 and Alpha for at least a couple of years now.

Another major rendering package, Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman Toolkit AKA PRman may already be available for Linux as well. I saw a demo at ACM/SIGGRAPH'98

I just hope that the various 3D modeling and animation packages are ported to Linux as well. The Sidefx Houdini port is a great first step, but I'm hoping that Alias|Wavefront Maya and Softimage|3D are not far behind.

I just wanted to emphasize that mental ray has been available on Linux x86 and Alpha for at least a couple of years now.

Another major rendering package, Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman Toolkit AKA PRman may already be available for Linux as well. I saw a demo at ACM/SIGGRAPH'98

I just hope that the various 3D modeling and animation packages are ported to Linux as well. The Sidefx Houdini port is a great first step, but I'm hoping that Alias|Wavefront Maya and Softimage|3D are not far behind.