mea culpa, mea culpa!
ok i admit i dont have any experience whatsoever with vl. ok, i took the images on the website for THE best renderings that are available, but what else would you expect?
And besides, i think renderman is the best rendering engine around, and if vl ever wants to play with the ‘big guys’, it sure needs to gain a little more realism than it can provide now (i’m only judging on the pics i’ve seen, and that have been commented as children playing around by guinness).
I hope this soothes guinness’s and other vl fans’ wrath towards my humble person
LIGHTFLOW. In my opinion it has the greatest capabilities- sure, chrome, glass, caustics, radiosity, the whole shebang, but it also has a very very cool volumetrics engine. It’s incredible! If you install lightflow, run the test file smoke.py. It’s crazy, some of the best smoke I’ve seen from any 3D package, ever. It can do quite amazing things with interiors of materials that is very rarely taken advantage of fully.
and i though lf’s volumetrix engine was a peace of dam shit!! the fact that you need to have a special interface for your smoke scared me off a bit, but i guess i should try out the smoke.py file anyway.
how long does it take to render on your machine, skates? (on my 300mhz it would take ages…)
POVray/MegaPov, VirtuaLight and BMRT do volumetric rendering as well, it is not exclusive to LF. And from what I have tried, MegaPov for instance seems to be faster too. Of course it takes effort to be able to use it effectively, but so does Lightflow, which has not very adequate documentation on that (or several other) topic.
HAHAHAHA!!! 