Modern alternative to POVray scene description languade

Question

in short:

Do you know something for generative scripting of 3D scene and rendering it like POVray, but with more modern rendering technology ( Metropolis-light transport, GPGPU, ambient occlusion ), and idealy with scene description language based on general purpose language like Java or python. Simply - more modern replacement for POVray

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long storry:

I'm using sometimes POVray for generative design/graphics, because scene-description language of POVray is very good, and it is the only 3D rendering software I know where the primary mean of input is "to write the code of scene" rather than "to model the scene using GUI"

On the other hand, the core of POVray is quite old-fasioned. The visual quality is far behind for example Luxrender, and speed is also not so great ( there are missing such common tricks as ambient occlussion ). On the other hand input files for luxrender are not supposed to be writen by hand ( for example there is nothing like POVray's great solid modeling with bolean operations on geometric primitives, or surfaces described by analytic function prescription or "blobs" which I use for scripting a lot ).

Also, I think It would be nice, to integratde the scene description language within some general purpose programming language ( like python or java ) or at least have some fully-capable interface to these languages.

I wonder if there is something like this?

I my knowledge, the closes to this was SunFlow which can be imported as a library to any Java program, and the primitive classes and interfaces could be extended in standard java - so you can in principle define your own geometric primitives this way. However, SunFlow project seems dead now, and there are no good tutorials how to use this direct java interface.

Answer 1

No, not at the current time.

Among open source raytracers you have Luxrender, Yafaray, Sunflow and Aqsis, but none of them supports creating scenes with a scene description language as with POVRay. Only simple POVRay scenes has the potential to be converted to other formats, since it is not declarative, but a script language.

It is possible to write XML for Yafaray, but it does not have the same capabilities.