POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered

Marty writes "The very long awaited version 3.5 of POV-Ray is available. POV is the pre-eminent open source ray tracer. The new version has many wonderful improvements and is able to allow amateurs and pros alike to generate CG images to drool over." I spent many hours mucking about with POV back in the day. Course CPUs are a little faster now, so my guess is those render times don't suck as bad.

Comments

Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers?

[FreeUser]

So many modellers have the opposite problem ... no (free as in freedom) rendering engine. For older versions of POV there were various modellers of various quality ... none quite up to Blender or Lightwave's quality IIRC, though it's been a couple of years since I've looked for one (like you, I'm now back in the market, however).

Don't say "Blender"

I agree, but not for the same reason as you. Blender is a closed-source product that stores its data in a proprietary format...when Blender goes away, all that hard work and all those cool animations become so many random bits.

- that has to be the most obtuse UI ever programmed.

Here I disagree. For many things Blender has the easiest interface I've seen (for others things like Lightwave are better). It is different that what users of Lightwave would be used to, but it is by no means obtuse. Indeed, things like their particle system and spline animation controls are fantastic. Just because you're used to something doesn't necessarilly mean thats the best way to go about doing it (the same goes for some Blender bigots who dismiss other modellers as well ... as far as I've seen none of the modellers have a monopoly on the Right Way to do things, and some manage to make things easy that the others complicate, by virtue of the GUI design choices made).

However, I too would be interested in a good modeller and animation choreographer frontend to POV. Perhaps its time for a few of us to get together and start throwing one together. :-)