POV-Ray is described as 'The Persistence of Vision Raytracer is a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86 Linux. The source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports' and is an app in the photos & graphics category. There are more than 25 alternatives to POV-Ray for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Sketchup and Autodesk 3ds Max apps. The best POV-Ray alternative is LuxCoreRender, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like POV-Ray are MoonRay, Adobe Dimension, Fragmentarium and RenderMan.
LuxCoreRender is a physically based and unbiased rendering engine. Based on state of the art algorithms, LuxCoreRender simulates the flow of light according to physical equations, thus producing realistic images of photographic quality.
LuxCoreRender is the most popular Windows, Mac & Linux alternative to POV-Ray.
LuxCoreRender is the most popular Open Source & free alternative to POV-Ray.
MoonRay is DreamWorks Animation’s in-house 3D renderer, used to render all DreamWorks movies since How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.
Versatile 3D design tool combining asset compositing and photorealistic rendering with real-time previews. Access Adobe Stock seamlessly and enhance with Photoshop for practical workflows.
Adobe Dimension is the most popular commercial alternative to POV-Ray.
Fragmentarium is an open source, cross-platform IDE for exploring pixel based graphics on the GPU.
PhotoRealistic RenderMan, or PRMan for short, is a proprietary photorealistic RenderMan-compliant renderer.
Mitsuba is a research-oriented rendering system for forward and inverse light transport simulation. It consists of a core library and a set of plugins that implement functionality ranging from materials and light sources to complete rendering algorithms.
Malt is a fully customizable real-time rendering framework for animation and illustration. Designed as a community effort to expand the possibility space of 3d rendering, it provides graphics programmers and technical artist an enjoyable “shadertoy-like” workflow inside Blender...
SheepIT is a render-farm, not a 3D rendering software, since they use Blender for that.
SheepIT is the most popular Web-based alternative to POV-Ray.
Indigo Renderer is an unbiased, physically based and photorealistic renderer which simulates the physics of light to achieve near-perfect image realism. With an advanced physical camera model, a super-realistic materials system and the ability to simulate complex lighting...
appleseed is a modern, open source, physically-based rendering engine designed to produce photorealistic images, animations and visual effects.
Powerful, feature-rich and fast standalone raytracing renderer.
Exporters from Blender and Google SketchUp are also available. Allows network rendering of images and animation
Supported Features*
Sunflow is an open source rendering system for photo-realistic image synthesis. It is written in Java and built around a flexible ray tracing core and an extensible object-oriented design. It was created as a framework for experimenting with global illumination algorithms and...
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Dimension is too realistic, I need 90s / early 2000s level output