Trying to render a scene using Blender 2.37 and Yafray. Unchanged settings in a file which was saved with Blender 2.36. However Im getting different results. Ive noticed that quite a few buttons in the raytracing properties have changed. But can anyone clue me in as to what exactly has changed in Blender 2.37 and Yafray integration?
Appearntly, blender 2.37 is designed to work with a version of Yafray that hasn’t been released yet, so some thing arn’t rendered properly. I guess many many people have already asked this question and the “gurus” are tired of answering it.
C911CA
The first place to look for answers would of course be the yafray site, you can find a thread there with prerelease build as well, also see the link in the first post to the commit logs to precisely find out what has been added and changed:
http://www.yafray.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=332
So to make a long story short, Yafray integration is kinda broken at the moment?
From the site that you mention I gather that blender 2.37 is adapted to the next release of yafray, effectively breaking some things with the current release of yafray.
Its no wonder that so many questions get asked, since one would expect that any information about any changes in the yafray integration module would be listed in the blender release logs. The only thing that gets mentioned is that blender 2.37 has enabled options for an upcoming release of yafray. That leaves a LOT of questions unanswered. A better formulated “heads up” stating that users should expect strange results with the current yafray implementation could have gone a long way to clear up some confusion, IMHO.
Fair enough though, guess I’ll just have to stick to Blender 2.36 until new Yafray comes out.
or download the CVS from the yafray sight…
this should probably be a sticky until the release. how many times has this been asked?
My thoughts exactly.
Anyways, I compiled yafray from cvs, now its doing its thing again. To be specific, the thing that wasnt working was refractions and transparancies. It was doing it properly so I couldnt get glass no matter what I did.
The CVS version thankfully fixes that.
Allthough there ought to be a sticky on compiling blender or yafray from cvs, since its not all that straightforward if you have never dealt with cvs before.
Yes, sorry, I always had lots of trouble making ‘short stories’… which I suspect being part of the problem actually…
From the site that you mention I gather that blender 2.37 is adapted to the next release of yafray, effectively breaking some things with the current release of yafray.
That is only true for hdr backgrounds, I simply forgot that part. Everything else still works as it should more or less (more-- or is that less++ ?..), it isn’t really blender that was broken, rather yafray itself always had been the problem. The old yafray blendershader never was quite upto date (not that it really is now).
Its no wonder that so many questions get asked, since one would expect that any information about any changes in the yafray integration module would be listed in the blender release logs. The only thing that gets mentioned is that blender 2.37 has enabled options for an upcoming release of yafray. That leaves a LOT of questions unanswered. A better formulated “heads up” stating that users should expect strange results with the current yafray implementation could have gone a long way to clear up some confusion, IMHO.
I so wish that was true…
I don’t have any control about what is written in the blender release logs btw.
Also, there should’nt have been any trouble creating refraction/reflection using the old yafray, at least still works for me using the old yafray.
Strange. Has there been a updated release after the initial one of blender 2.37? Or does it perhaps make a difference between using yafray internal and yafray via xml.
Anyways, on my setup, when using the old yafray, with scenes that rendered perfect under blender 2.36, they were not rendered transparent. No matter what I did, the I just could not get objects to refract anymore. During the fake pass, you could see the dots outlining what should be the refraction, but when it came to rendering, it was filled with solid color. Made no difference if I made an object black,white, red or whatever, even if transparency was set to 0, or reflectivity or fresnel set to 0 or whatever. Even when using the “clear glass, colored glass” presets in the material editor made no difference. Reflection still worked as it should. But no dice with refractions. Then I compiled the latest cvs version of yafray, and lo and behold, everything working as it should.
The nasty part about this was, I was in the process of making a render of a glass object for a client, and since that client was of the very impatient type (how I hate clients like that.), I was trying to speed up my renders as much as possible. I thought I would try out blender 2.37 because it supported rendering in threads, and I thought that maybe yafray would do it as well. Anyways, in the end I had to fire up blender 2.36 again since I just couldnt get 2.37 to render glass properly. Luckily blender is nice and self contained so that its easy to run multiple versions side by side.
I also realised that blenders new threads feature would make no difference with yafray since it was still the old yafray. Nonetheless it all went out good in the end. I had the option of using either 3D Studio Max or Blender for that specific project, and Im glad I was able to use blender for something professional. Or in other words, something that I get paid for. 
Now, if only yafray had a decent motion blur AND would have the feature to enable multiple networked PCs to render in parallell on a single image, then I’d be a very happy camper. No need to deal with Mental Ray and its nasty licensing policy ever again. 
No, shouldn’t make any difference. The only difference with the new yafray is that the ‘color glass’ and ‘clear glass’ presets are the same, the filter parameter is not used.
Anyways, on my setup, when using the old yafray, with scenes that rendered perfect under blender 2.36, they were not rendered transparent. No matter what I did, the I just could not get objects to refract anymore. During the fake pass, you could see the dots outlining what should be the refraction, but when it came to rendering, it was filled with solid color. Made no difference if I made an object black,white, red or whatever, even if transparency was set to 0, or reflectivity or fresnel set to 0 or whatever. Even when using the “clear glass, colored glass” presets in the material editor made no difference. Reflection still worked as it should. But no dice with refractions. Then I compiled the latest cvs version of yafray, and lo and behold, everything working as it should.
ok, then I see what you mean. For the old 0.0.7, for glass objects, when used with full GI, Blender’s ‘Ref’ slider (which specifies amount of diffuse reflection) should be set to 0.