I think I remember playing with POV-Ray (along with Yafaray) as alternative renderers for Blender back in the early 2000s, not long after Blender had been ported to OS X. At that point I had been making simple scenes in Blender for a while but had grown tired of the limitations of its internal renderer, most notably its inability to render caustics and bounced light, and so was trying my luck with other renderers.
Never did get that far with either. If I recall, the problem with POV-Ray was getting the Blender file translated correctly for POV-Ray to render right, and while Yafray didn’t have the translation issue it was too slow to practically use on my little 400Mhz iMac G3.
It never even crossed my mind back then to directly write code for POV-Ray. At that point, in my teenage mind 3D was something you did with GUI software packages like Strata 3D and Blender.
Never did get that far with either. If I recall, the problem with POV-Ray was getting the Blender file translated correctly for POV-Ray to render right, and while Yafray didn’t have the translation issue it was too slow to practically use on my little 400Mhz iMac G3.
It never even crossed my mind back then to directly write code for POV-Ray. At that point, in my teenage mind 3D was something you did with GUI software packages like Strata 3D and Blender.