YafaRay Crash Course Notes / English /Spanish

[Alvaro]

Perspective machine by Albrecht Dürer, The Painter's Manual, 1525

This is the material support of the crash course on YafaRay I did three weeks ago in Murcia, Spain.

PDF slides, English version.
PDF slides, Spanish version.
Practice files / Ficheros de prácticas
OpenOffice source document, English version.

I have included some practical comments about different questions you won't be able to find in the User Guide, so please take a look at it. It can be used as a quick introduction to YafaRay and general raytracing techniques. It could be useful as well for teachers preparing lessons about raytracing and for lecturers in local users groups.

Alvaro

[organic]

Thanks Alvaro, downloading now....!

[Eclectiel]

Yeah, is great to have a comprehensive, quick and to the point, guide with simple graphical examples.

Thanks!

[comeinandburn]

thanks for making this available to the community!

it's much appreciated!

[Alvaro]

thanks for the comments !

The techniques explained can be applied not only to Yafaray but to any other raytracer using the algorithms described in these notes.

Some engines use varations of what is described in the 'Raytracing Roundup', but by reading these notes you will be able to understand what might be happening 'behind the scenes'. Ray tracing is always the basis of all algorithms. Also YafaRay imprementations are pretty straightforward, so the specific comments on YafaRay algorithms can be extrapolated to any other engine.

Many techniques are pretty common for all engines, like adaptive sampling, photon mapping, etc. maybe they just have a different name, for instance some engines have extra interpolation controls for Final Gather which is in fact an Irradiance Cache implementation.

Others use exotic names for new ways of implementing well known tecniques. The main goal of these notes is to know how a raytracer, in this case YafaRay, works.

[ankit_pruthi]

Thanks Alvaro. This is one of the best guides on understanding raytracing and global illumination concepts unlike most others which only tell what a setting does.

[tyrant monkey]

thanks for the notes the explained a lot of things to me that I didn't really know about yafaray in a very simple and understandable way.

i think the are required reading for anybody new to using a GI raytracer like yafaray.