I'm wondering... is POVRay still the most liked / preferred HQ rendering tool for LDraw scenes / animations out there?
I mean with GUI tools like blender around and all.
Just wondering in preparation of the LDCad animation HQ export feature.
Yes, POV-Ray is still the unchallenged No. 1.
+ It's free.
+ It's text based = manual and scripted post-processing is possible.
+ It's quite economic with usage of system resouces.
While I really like your renders, MODO is not free. You're going to have a hard time convincing me to spend over 1000 USD on my part time hobby.
I use POV-Ray for all my renders. I recently saw this on the POV-Ray newsgroup - this was rendered using UberPOV (an POV-Ray extension)
This looks nice,
What is the difference between normal povray and uberray? As the github page doesn't do much explaining all I can make out it does more lighting stuff or something.
Could you give a link to that pic on the povray forum?
This is quite interesting...
Really nice stuff. A short howto at the wiki would help enourmously.
w.
If I could for instance export directly to a different renderer without using Blender as a go-between I would consider switching from POV-Ray. POV-Ray is simply too slow IMO, but at the same time Blender is too convoluted IMO.
I also agree with Willy. We need a "tutorial for dummies" for us to change.
What do you called too slow? I usually spend between one or two hours for a render in PovRay for a 1080p image and high quality radiosity turned on.
BTW I've tried uberpov with setting giving similar results as above, and here I can say it's really long. Almost ten times as more as standard Povray renders.
Anything over 4-5 hours is above my limit, personally.
[edit]
This is off topic, but if you could click the 'Reply' button below the post you are responding to, it will not mess up the threaded forum view.
Sorry for that, my forum is not set to display replies under the previous post, I kind of forget to click reply.
Reuben, have you made any progress on making these settings play nice with L3P or LDView export settings?
I did it by editing the lg_colors.inc file, and render using uberpov instead of povray. Then you can use ldview to export as usual.
You only need to add some statements in the material finish definition. Copy paste what you find in the PovRay forum post.
But I gave up using those settings as it made renders go really really long...
Darats Wrote:I did it by editing the lg_colors.inc file, and render using uberpov instead of povray. Then you can use ldview to export as usual.
You only need to add some statements in the material finish definition. Copy paste what you find in the PovRay forum post.
But I gave up using those settings as it made renders go really really long...
That is my experience as well. The renders take a long time.
Also, there are speckles on the part surfaces, and the steps you take to get rid of them make the renders take even longer.
Here's another Sunflow image that I thought looks very nice. I haven't been able to match this level of quality in my own tests, however.
(2018-03-03, 11:46)Michael Horvath Wrote: [ -> ]Yafaray has XML scene description now.
http://www.yafaray.org/development/docum...n/XMLspecs
http://www.yafaray.org/community/forum/v...=13&t=5007
One could bypass Blender completely and do an straight LDraw-to-Yafaray conversion, I think. Yafaray is free too. POV-Ray is just so awfully slow....
But, isn't Blender good enough for rendering? Blender has been used for
some pretty stunning images. Granted, they used Mecabricks instead of LDraw and Mecabricks is a lot more 'modern' so in that regard it's an unfair comparison. But my point is that Blender is a very good renderer too, so I'm wondering why you would want to 'bypass' Blender if you already got it in Blender in the first place?
(2018-03-03, 18:31)Merlijn Wissink Wrote: [ -> ]But, isn't Blender good enough for rendering? Blender has been used for some pretty stunning images. Granted, they used Mecabricks instead of LDraw and Mecabricks is a lot more 'modern' so in that regard it's an unfair comparison. But my point is that Blender is a very good renderer too, so I'm wondering why you would want to 'bypass' Blender if you already got it in Blender in the first place?
Blender's fileformat is all but simple, I did consider it at one point for LDCad as I'm mainly exporting to animate.
I also considered .obj but that one is too simple.
So far POV-Ray is just right for what I wanted to do.
(2018-03-03, 18:31)Merlijn Wissink Wrote: [ -> ]But my point is that Blender is a very good renderer too, so I'm wondering why you would want to 'bypass' Blender if you already got it in Blender in the first place?
I want a text interface instead of a GUI interface. I'm not sure Blender can handle a model as big as Datsville for instance.
(2014-10-30, 19:13)Roland Melkert Wrote: [ -> ]I'm wondering... is POVRay still the most liked / preferred HQ rendering tool for LDraw scenes / animations out there?
I mean with GUI tools like blender around and all.
Just wondering in preparation of the LDCad animation HQ export feature.
Pixar's RenderMan is free for non-commercial use.