Sometime at work, colleague start discussing about the new renderman (v17) and the would it be fit for architectural pipeline musing, it's been a while since I tested PRMan (pirated edition of course :), that time I already accustomed with V-Ray's "one click render" way and thus feeling upset with what PRMan produce by default (speed and quality).
It's only when I found pov-ray (again not used in architectural) that I finally realized the power behind both renderers, their scene description language: RI and RSL for Renderman and SDL for POV-Ray. Sure they are two different thing just about how both are different too. But comparing any of the two with the rest (older V-Ray, KT, LuxRender, Yafaray, etc) is even bigger mistake and obviously unfair. But people usually only care the result and leaving the "how" question subjective to user's skill.
Revisiting povray site is a little worrying, I think it was 2008 the first time povray support multi-threading (v3.7) and yet final version still not arrived. However considering their novel idea behind povray it maybe not as easy to accomplish than other renderers (which usually already multi-core aware since inception). I mean imagine how those procedural models, CSGs and all different exotic primitives blend in the threads? they aren't plain meshes, even Maya use post rendering for PFX.
So there I go try dig more about SDL (still personally not much interested) using Scite which has pov api/syntax support and try to find non interactive way to do batch rendering, yeah using python I could do stealth subprocess, but I want a pure one :). If I'm not mistaken povray for linux is a console app, so I tried to build that one from its unix source (which somehow more updated than windows' source) but failed when using mingw... continuing with VS2008 express way and surprisingly there is a project called "console" which turned out the one I'm looking for.
povconsole32.exe
notes:
- exr support is disabled, I can build static openexr 1.7.1 with VS (need a little change) and completing its tests but somehow with povray, it crashed during writing.
- this is just the renderer, standard libraries (includes) files still needed (point that in POVINC environment) but no installation required (portable), no registry nor settings files.
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