Just curious if anyone has ever used povray to develop graphical assets for their game. A friend of mine is currently enrolled on a povray course, using to for molecular models, and I looked into it. It's very interesting, and it creates great looking images. In my case, whenever I've tried to use blender to create a 3d image, the results are often less than satisfactory, but since in povray you don't 'sculpt' your image, but rather program it in code, I almost always get the result I want.

I'm still working with basic shapes and lighting, but so far I've made some interesting images:

https://imgur.com/4uSQ8Cl

https://imgur.com/ZDSlmg6

These might not be very impressive, but I made them a lot faster than I would've done in Blender. Also, I'm not sure about this, but I understand that since this is ray tracing, not 3d meshes, the spheres, cylinders and cones have real curves, and should look better.

So, is anyone using povray?

I have used POVRay before. It is nice for quick, one-off renders of things that I generate procedurally. The bulk of my creation, though, is in Blender. There is a lot of overlap between the two, though. If generating scenes through code is your thing, Blender does have a Python interface. And you can create scenes in Blender and render them using a POVRay-based renderer (available through addons, see

Once you move beyond procedural things then creating anything of more than basic complexity quickly becomes quite a chore if you are hand-authoring your POVRay scenes. At that point, you're much better off using a visual editor such as Blender to compose them and exporting if you still prefer the POVRay renderer.

Also, Blender uses ray tracing for Blender Internal and Cycles renderers, and has numerous tools for creating Bezier and nurbs based shapes that are tesselated rather than being discrete meshes, so those really aren't advantages that POVRay has over Blender.

Regarding your example images, they contain very simple geometry and very simple materials; real game graphics would usually be more complex, and interactive tools with realtime previews would have a greater advantage over working out formulas.

In a modeling application you can drag vertices and see the actual shapes and positions of your objects in any 3d previews or 2d sections and projections you want, you can adjust sliders and layers and see what materials look like, you can paint and reorganize texture maps, and so on; the workflow of editing a text scene description and rendering it is much less convenient.

For exactly specifying procedurally generated objects, most modeling tools offer scripting facilities to create and animate anything you could make with interactive editing tools.