Getting started with Yafaray render engine

Hi there. As we know all about this powerful production-ready, fastest renderer in own way, just not saying more and take our aim into the topic of this thread. The aim is not propogande, but the aim is discussion and share our knowledge or something said as “skills :)”.
Ok, so, if you have the scene which was finished exactly for Yafaray or would like to litting to it, so, please, share your scenes, portfolios, renders or useful manuals or something similar. I think this thread will be “FAQ” to new users or for “advanced users”. Please, keep alive and help to Yafaray be alive! :wink:
With best wishes,
Odilkhan.

Yafaray doesnt have a forum of their own?

They do: http://www.yafaray.org/

The Gallery if you want to check it out: http://www.yafaray.org/gallery?g2_itemId=39

All of this has in the YF, but there are just a few people which is posting something new than BA community.

Are there nobody interesting? come on!

Well, where are yours? :slight_smile:

Sorry to disappoint, but Yafaray isn’t a terribly popular renderer. Development has been quite slow in the past few years, integration has been a bit sub-par, and it can be a bit esoteric in terms of scene and material setup. I think you’d be lucky to find two or three artists here who have taken a scene or project to completion with it.

Hi again. I know, but as V-Ray for Blender developer (Andrei Izrantcev) said sometimes ago: “Best tool is which you can understand it and using, not new one”. So, this tool maybe in low priority to anyone, but anyway, i think we tooken it

How is the implementation of PBGI in Yafaray ?

I found some articles about PBGI implementation in YR

and Cycles
https://developer.blender.org/T27836
https://developer.blender.org/T21426

sidenote: related info about Real time Point Based Global Illumination

http://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/~boubek/PBGI/
http://www.aduprat.com/portfolio/?page=articles/PBGI


I don’t know that. It can be just by developers (e.g. David Bluecame).

Yafaray is opensource. So any developer who wants to play with its code can try to add PBGI.
It does not mean that we have heard of that or that he even tries to promote his tests.

These links are bugreports about Blender 2.5x versions.
They are about Blender Internal’s Indirect lighting.
Brecht is just trying to explain that Blender Internal’s Indirect Lighting is older than PBGI and there is no reason to expect same result from Blender Internal.
He just mentioned Cycles to say that it will have a better Indirect lighting than Blender Internal.
It does not mean that Brecht had intentions to add PBGI to Cycles.
It is not related to Cycles.

PBGI was a try to render fast but it never was simple to set-up for user.
It is the reason why pathtracing (easy to set-up and better quality) is more popular.

Nowadays, that people are more numerous to consider Real Time rendering as a valuable solution. PBGI is revived.

the best thing for yafora is to make an exporter for Anim8or.

Getting started with YafaRay or another render engine for that matter means reading documentation first and the YafaRay project is well documented from users perspective except from the multipass rendering part rencently added by David. I believe it is not difficult to get good results from the start as long as you know what you are doing. There is not esoteric or obscure settings, we use the same algorithms than other engines and our material and texturing workflow comes directly from Blender internal. Lack of better integration is not our fault, Blender render pipeline makes difficult integrating any external engine. For instance, it is imposible to get Blender doing something as simple and logical as this. I have completed dozens of professional projects with YafaRay and keep doing so right now. Even more important, I think that in the YafaRay project we have clear ideas about how to improve YafaRay in the future.

Ok, so, what do you recommend to us? Closing thread?

He is recommending studying the documentation and gaining experience with the software.

Okay, so Yafaray is still seeing at least some development (noting David Bluecame’s work), but someone checking up on the project is not going to know that when considering how outdated the website is (not only does it give the impression of very little updating, but some pages look outright neglected).

I know the Yafaray fans get tired of hearing allegations that their chosen engine is largely a dead project, but the aging website is not helping to dispel that in the least (and their community forum isn’t exactly booming with activity either).

Now I do admit that Yafaray can be a decent solution in a number of cases (noting the work of the few who use it), but please note the slow development and the fact that you will have to fake various effects that you get out of the box in other engines (like SSS).

Ok to all :slight_smile:

Claiming that the system isn’t esoteric or confusing, and then saying that the material system is based on BI are two very different statements. The rendering world as a whole has very purposefully moved away from BI-style scene setup and material creation for that exact reason.

Well in fact YafaRay materials is also a nodes based system and uses phisically based rendering since it was one of the first engines to use PBRT tech. Many things people started to use with Cycles, Substance or Marmoset are old news to us.


Corona or Marmoset success also show that you don’t need a GPU pathtracer or a nodes based material system to produce fast good work. We are thinking about implementing OSL, maybe this way we will have access to Blender nodes editor. It is quite sad that we can not import a simple texture input from Cycles.

http://www.yafaray.org/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2455