Blender 2.4 was kind of terrible to use from an animation perspective, but the controls for simple objects / cycles rendering was never really that difficult IMO. The key was having the knowledge to stay on the "nice parts" of Blender.
Blender 2.6 and 3.0 these days have made great strides at being easier to use from an animation and rigging perspective.
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The harsh shadow lines could be made easier if you used area-lamps (in Blender) for example. They probably exist in POV-ray, but a 3d GUI to move-and-place these objects around grossly simplifies the effort, compared to placing the objects around with a text-based format like POV-Ray.
POV-Ray is also very old. Turner Whitted's recursive ray tracing paper is from 1979. POV-Ray was released in 1991, but was based on an earlier raytracer called DKBTrace that was written sometime in the 80's. Blender is more modern and isn't built around the limitations of what was feasible to render in a reasonable amount of time on the computers of the 80's and 90's.
I started with my 8 MHz Atari, each test scene took at least 10 minutes for a stamp-size picture and then the sphere was in the wrong place and wasn't visible or the wrong texture. It took me soo long to get the hang of the coordinate system and the language. But fun it was!
I printed the documentation so I could read it while the computer was buzy rendering.
I also wrote a small program for my Atari Falcon that would turn of the graphics chip to give me more rendering speed. Since it was a shared bus it used up something like 25% CPU on full colour.
Blender of course has a Python API, but the text for POV-Ray is almost certainly easier to think and use. After all, Python's "print" statement is just easier to use than going into Blender docs wondering what bpy.context.blend_data is exactly.
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That's probably POV-Ray's biggest feature. It is truly a domain-specific language for describing 3d worlds and objects.
They do: http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.2/38/
> a 3d GUI to move-and-place these objects around grossly simplifies the effort, compared to placing the objects around with a text-based format like POV-Ray.
This can depend on what you're doing and what background you bring to the work. ie: Just recently, I've found myself more effective developing 3D print designs using a textual language than via a drag/drop UI. (But I bring a programming background, like to think in abstractions, and was making designs that were quite inorganic...)
Comparing POV-Ray to Cycles or Octane would make more sense.
i like using code instead of a gui for some 3d stuff
I actually made it several years ago, probably around 2007, I only re-rendered it and uploaded it to YouTube recently. I always felt there was a rather painful skill ceiling in POV-Ray. Sure, people have done some really amazing things with it, but going from something fairly simple like this to something really impressive required a level of magic and time I could never get out of POV-Ray.
Obviously it's command line rather than a visual tool.
The best use I ever made of it was modeling an addition to my paternal grandparents' barn before they built it. I entered measurements from tape measures and photographs to build up the basic shapes and the addition, before-and-after.
There was something addictive about seeing the final traced image build up line by line. I dissipated a lot of computer-hours in the 1990s with POV-Ray on a 486, then later a Pentium or Power Mac. I even showed my other grandfather how to run it on his FPU-less 68k Mac; now that was slow.
Alongside using Enlightenment as their window manager.
It was always cool to check their desktops.
It's funny to think I had to leave my 286 on all night to get a single 320x200 render like those in OP's link. Now you can render scenes like that in realtime.
For some reason, it’s just really captivating to build a scene using declarative code, rather than doing so visually in an editor like Blender.
Looks like it's being modernized to build with c++11 compilers
The free stuff is here: https://www.blender.org/support/tutorials/
After growing past that, the paid stuff is inexpensive and well made: it: https://studio.blender.org/welcome/ ($10 a month.)
One cool thing about the experience of using POV is that you can scroll in one dimension and see the entire organization of elements that will become a sensory window into the imagination. If you can learn the syntax and options, you can effectively break down what would otherwise be many different sets of interfaces and gain an enhanced feeling of accessibility.
If you combine this with an appreciation for abstraction-focused scene modeling, you can reach this point of really amazing emotion where you realize you can create or model _anything_ with the provided tools, as long as you can embrace the need for abstraction as its own sort of user-mindset technology.
The closest analog that comes to mind outside of 3D would be MacPaint, MS Paint, Grafx2...if you've ever seen someone seriously plan their home garden or design a home theater in one of those apps, and then build the damn thing in real life, you may know what I'm talking about.
Outside of that...maybe something like watching a concept designer use a bic crystal pen to sketch out an entire world on newsprint.
With POV-Ray I find myself honing in on something like an intuitive feel for how much abstraction to employ to simply and effectively depict what I want to depict, given any time constraints. It's really cool to reach that point no matter the tool. I'm sure a lot of people feel similar feelings about their favorite programming tools as well.
In fact you could (and probably still can) use POV-Ray to render your Blender scene. Blender is not a renderer - it just ships with some integrated ones and integrations for various external ones.
It might be misguided but the ffmpeg builds in WASM made me think it might be possible but I reached the end of Google/SO trying to get the Boost libs to link while running emconfigure with the existing codebase.
I'm totally winging it so if someone has any ideas that could set me on the right path it would be greatly appreciated.
I had no idea, back then, just how much impact the process of thinking in CSG would have on my nascent mind.
A truly great piece of software for a wain cutting their teeth with math and programmatic construction.
