Having talked with Ton R. a fair amount, I'm sure he was speaking of raytracing in general, and not specifically about Blender's Raytacer. That said there are several points to be made about this thread:
1) Yes, Raytracing is usable, if you want to make a still, or a 10 second animation. But in general, raytracing is not used in production environments because of the CPU cost. (Pixar only just added selective raytracing on "Finding Nemo"). Blender is an animation package, not a still image renderer, so it tends to favor speed. The fact that CPUs are 40x faster is just now making selective raytrace a viable option for people with out a 1000 CPU render farm.
2) The Raytracing in Blender is selective. Reflections and shadows can be raytraced. Everything else is z-buffered shading with shadow buffers. Again favoring speed.
3) This raytrace HAS NOT seen a release yet. It exists only in CVS for testing (and the "before and after images" have one serious flaw that has already been found and fixed). So this whole discussion is a bit premature.
What an odd comment.
Even in the relatively early days (I personally started with rev 1.76) Blender has always rendered faster under Linux than Windows.
Editing performance was a bit of a problem, since most gfx cards did not support Hardware acceleration under linux. (DRI was a fairly new addition to XFree86 at that time.) Blender is rather 3D graffics hardware intensive (are any 3D apps not?) as it was born under Irix on SGI boxes.
However, things have changed. Two of the major vendors of high-end 3D gfx cards now have very good accelerated support either through their own driver (NVidia) or the DRI module (ATI). With the former, performance between Windows and Linux is nearly identical. For ATI users Linux performance can often be better, due to the fact that ATI's Windows drivers are much more painful to configure than DRl (you probably could get better performance from Window's drivers if you spent many many hours tweaking the ATI driver settings).
Those two brands of card probably cover 95% of all serious 3D users. Blender is ment to be a proffessional application, not a toy. It has a way to go to be on par with Maya or LW, but even now, as an 80% ready application at 0% cost, it is an excelent tool for beginers, and even many professionals who don't regularly need many of the advanced (and expensive) features of the high end packages.
I'll even risk being/.'s http://www.soylent-green.com to see some of my blender work. And I'm not even a power user.
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Having talked with Ton R. a fair amount, I'm sure he was speaking of raytracing in general, and not specifically about Blender's Raytacer. That said there are several points to be made about this thread: 1) Yes, Raytracing is usable, if you want to make a still, or a 10 second animation. But in general, raytracing is not used in production environments because of the CPU cost. (Pixar only just added selective raytracing on "Finding Nemo"). Blender is an animation package, not a still image renderer, so it tends to favor speed. The fact that CPUs are 40x faster is just now making selective raytrace a viable option for people with out a 1000 CPU render farm. 2) The Raytracing in Blender is selective. Reflections and shadows can be raytraced. Everything else is z-buffered shading with shadow buffers. Again favoring speed. 3) This raytrace HAS NOT seen a release yet. It exists only in CVS for testing (and the "before and after images" have one serious flaw that has already been found and fixed). So this whole discussion is a bit premature.
What an odd comment. Even in the relatively early days (I personally started with rev 1.76) Blender has always rendered faster under Linux than Windows. Editing performance was a bit of a problem, since most gfx cards did not support Hardware acceleration under linux. (DRI was a fairly new addition to XFree86 at that time.) Blender is rather 3D graffics hardware intensive (are any 3D apps not?) as it was born under Irix on SGI boxes. However, things have changed. Two of the major vendors of high-end 3D gfx cards now have very good accelerated support either through their own driver (NVidia) or the DRI module (ATI). With the former, performance between Windows and Linux is nearly identical. For ATI users Linux performance can often be better, due to the fact that ATI's Windows drivers are much more painful to configure than DRl (you probably could get better performance from Window's drivers if you spent many many hours tweaking the ATI driver settings). Those two brands of card probably cover 95% of all serious 3D users. Blender is ment to be a proffessional application, not a toy. It has a way to go to be on par with Maya or LW, but even now, as an 80% ready application at 0% cost, it is an excelent tool for beginers, and even many professionals who don't regularly need many of the advanced (and expensive) features of the high end packages. I'll even risk being /.'s http://www.soylent-green.com to see some of my blender work. And I'm not even a power user.
If the format spec is available, Blender can do it (If you can find someone to write a script). Import/Export is handled by Python plugins.