funny story, a monk said to me yesterday "the answer is so obvious i'm not going to tell you". well, the answer was "use_pty", and it took me 12 hours to find it :) I solved this by using the Net::SSH::Perl of important note is use_pty to get povray to work right. This sets a pseudo tty on your remote machine. Without a proper tty, povray will not render. So if you are trying to emulate a shell, for any reason, this may be a solution for you.

#!/usr/bin/perl-w
use strict;
use Net::SSH::Perl;
my $host = "111.111.111.111";
my $user = "usernm";
my $pass = "passwd";
my $cmd = "povray +I/mypath/gigtown.pov";
my $ssh = Net::SSH::Perl->new($host,use_pty=>1);
$ssh->login($user, $pass);
print $ssh->cmd($cmd);
exit;
[download]

Final recap for povray/perl folks If you want to automate povray from outside your system. The hurdle is faking a shell. My solution involves running the above perl code inside a root crontab. This was the only solution i could come up with save from recompiling povray.