I am looking for a software able to ray-trace implicit surfaces (defined by f(x,y,z)=0 for a smooth enough function f) with simulation of diffuse light. Speed is not important (I'm doing high quality renders for short clips, not real time rendering).
- Surfer can do this but does not have diffuse light.
- POV-Ray can do this but it is not maintained anymore and diffuse light is complicated to set up (they call this radiosity), very slow, and I do not like the result.
- Blender can only render a small set of implicit surface, that they call metaballs (they get converted to meshes just before getting rendered), but metaballs are not good enough for what I want to render (think of a perfectly round torus that start getting deformed asymmetrically); its render engine Cycles has the right quality for me.
- I am currently working with CGAL to create a mesh sequence and Blender to render them with the plug in Stop Motion OBJ to load mesh sequence, but the workflow is cumbersome and takes time, CGAL is very complicated to use, the meshes are not very good, I failed to fix them with CGAL so I fix them through Blender but some of the fixes cannot be applied in batches (through what they call modifiers), and the resulting objects wobble and the normals need to be fixed but I do not know how.