#why 3ds
You picked a bad time to be asking questions, because the Man (Gary
Yost, great God of 3D who wrote the program and hates me talking
about his immortal status) is on vacation until December. He could
provide you with some definitive reasons and analysis, but perhaps
he'll forgive me for quoting a previous message from him on the
subject of 3DS3 and other renderers:
"Actually, if you're talking final output quality, Lightwave and 3DSr2
were very similar. They both computed color in 24-bit space and they
both used adaptive super-sampling for antialiasing.
However, the 3DSr3 renderer is so much better than Lightwave that it's
in a completely different league. If output quality is what you're
comparing, there IS NO COMPARISON. You just can't get the edge
quality with super-sampling that you can with an analytical
A-buffered renderer. Plus, you'll have color posterization
(quantization) problems in dark areas with Lightwave… especially
if you attempt to do gamma correction.
To be perfectly honest, we have objective proof that the 3DSr3
renderer is even better than the ALIAS renderer, which also uses
adaptive super-sampling. Gene Bodio currently has both systems in
his studio and he's sending the ALIAS system back because it's so
slow and the quality is so bad.
Edge and color quality is something we made sure in 3DSr3 was as good
as Renderman. Nobody else except for Wavefront (and Pixar, of
course) in the commercial rendering business can honestly make that
statement.
IMHO, I think you can get superb results from some of the ray-traced
programs out there, but you pay the penalty of waiting for hours for
a frame (not to mention a whole animation). With 3DS you get both
superb results as well as the ability to finish an animation within
your lifetime. At my age, time is important (you kids have more time
than I do, I suppose). If I were only doing single frames then
perhaps I would have considered a ray-traced program (well, not!).