I am currently following a tutorial for Blender, but came across POV-Ray mentioned as a renderer. After having researched it a bit, i took a look at it's scene description (scripting) language, which kind of fascinated me. But, after even more googling of the topic, i am still wondering: What are the main and key differences between working with 3D in resp. Blender and POV-Ray?
PS: I suspect this might not be the best place for a question such as this, but it seems to be the most suitable.
Blender's main focus has been around providing a strong 3D design surface / editor with support for a wide array of uses (everything from rendering static images and movies through to game creation).
POV-Ray, on the other hand, has always had the singular goal of providing a solid ray tracer. Whilst a text editor is usually supplied and 3rd party 3D editors are available, the core engine functionality (exposed via the language) has been the focus of the development effort.
It's also worth noting that while Blender still enjoys an active developer community, POV-Ray's small but dedicated development effort seems to have all but stalled for at least a few years now.
If you're looking for contemporary photorealistic renderer, then POV-Ray may not be the best choice... but if you're after an interesting little exploration into quite a powerful little ray tracer that can be controlled relatively easily by hand written scripts, then POV-Ray can be a lot of fun.
The biggest advantage of a text based modelling and texturing and animation scenario is that you can begin to design scenes, even animated ones with pen and paper.
The second-biggest advantage is that your scenes, especially animations, are not limited to the framework of a gui based editor.
Thirdly, since the renderer works at the command line, it can run as a back end process for a Web front end application.
