It’s really too bad that for any caustics or pretty Global illumination, you have to give up halos, volumetrics, sky textures, SSS, envmaps, and even image textures. Can they not be one? There was some build submitted to graphicall.org in which the Blender Internal had caustics implimented, but when will this be merged with the official blender?
forget about yafray it wont be there in 2.5
go with the latest upate of yafaray which has more goodies from blender
not all of them yet but it’s better than yafray!
so good luck with yafaray
now i’m waiting till the last release for 2.49 and i’ll re install yyfaray
and try to play with it
Salutations
Composite them.
That’s not just a crappy work around, that’s what the vast majority of people do, including myself.
yafray is not in 2.49 anymore
so you don’t have a choice now !
it’s yafaray only
Salutations
Just forget about the old yafray.
Yafaray is much more mature. SSS is the only thing besides maybe Normal Mapping that Yafaray really lacks (oh, and renderpasses maybe), and currently I can live without it. I’m also not sure what kind of problems you experience with Sky Textures or Image Textures…they work just as they do in Blender, at least for me. It also offers volumetrics, so I’m not sure why you’d give up on them…
So…where’s the problem? Making Blender’s Internal engine do all that is quite some work, it is being worked on but it might take a while…until then…
Composite them? Nope, you can’t even use the “do composite” button with yafray. Or at least it does nothing.
just downloaded YaFaRay 0.1.0 r315 n installed…but my 2.49 cannot use this YaFaRay thing
console read as follow:
dll: …\YafaRay\zlib1.dll
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “<string>”, line 1, in <module>
File “C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender.blender\scripts\yafaray_ui.
py”, line 44, in <module>
cdll.LoadLibrary(dllPath + dll + ‘.dll’)
File “C:\Python25\Lib\ctypes_init_.py”, line 431, in LoadLibrary
return self.dlltype(name)
File "C:\Python25\Lib\ctypes_init.py", line 348, in init
self._handle = _dlopen(self._name, mode)
WindowsError: [Error 126]
would someone plz decipher this piece for me n tell me what i can do to make things right
thx in advance
the compositor can load image sequences… you could set up another scene or even have a totally different blend file.
just load whatever passes from blender internal as renderlayers or as image files (if you saved them earlier) and load up your yafray rendered stuff too as an image sequence and away you go!
As others have noted yafray is deprecated and yaf(a)ray is recommended now. Try it, It’s much better!
do you have python 2.5 installed?
If you dont it might be best to completely uninstall yaf(a)ray, install python 2.5 anf then re-install yaf(a)ray…
that may seem un-necesary and you may be tempted to just directly install python but that often leads to other problems…
Like michealW said, you can take the rendered out image from Yafaray, save it as a TGA with alpha, then in the same blend file render the image from blender internal and use the internal render layers, with the loaded image file.
do a clay render with yaf and multiply it on a “color” render pass then add speculars: it is as easy as it is good looking.
Nope, because Yafray is unable to export any passes except for combined, z, and alpha. So rendering to an EXR sequence doesn’t even work because they don’t contain the extra parts needed to composite nicely.
So that makes compositing impossible? sheesh!
I never said load EXR from yafaray…
you can always composite on the beauty pass from yafaray!, (or a clay pass)
comp everything else you need from internal…
If you really need other passes from yafaray you render them separately…
If you really really need a specular pass from yafaray rather than internal for example just make all your materials black with no diffuse for example… need a diffuse pass? make them all white with no specular… whatever it is it’s easiliy done by changing the mats…
…that was the workflow in film for years before software started to support render passes nicely!
If that’s too much effort then learn python and write some scripts to swap your materials in and out…
…Or take advantage of yafaray’s intermediate format… output to XML and search and replace the mats to give passes…
Thanks for the information Michael W.
Not having a proper cgi education means I miss a lot. Is there somewhere I can get more information on other stuff I should know?
Hard, i don’t know what things you don’t know… the answer though is lots of reading!
a lame answer would be google! You’ll find a lot of stuff, but also a lot of misinformation… you need to get critical! try to go for specific subjects…
Books are good because they tend to cover a lot in one place so can be in-depth…
books on compositing, lighting, modelling (ie specific areas rather than generalist books) are good as they tend to have some real depth… I buy a lot of books whenever i’m trying to learn something new…
If you can’t afford them then try libraries… In the UK they’ll transfer books from library to library if they have it… if they don’t have a book they’ll usually buy it and add it to the collection… you may need to wait a few weeks…
even books on old software or other software can be good reading because superficially they have nothing to do with blender…
this means you’ll have to focus on techniques and approaches rather than software features or buttion layouts!
magazines like cinefex or highend can be good (or 3d world, but it’s a bit lightweight) especially if you get access to a large amount of back issues…
Learn how to control each aspect of the render.
By this i mean learn what each light option does, for example if you want a quick spec pass, you can disable all diffuse lighting from the lamps and just have spec and of course if you want a diffuse pass just disable spec.
This just involves reading of the blender wiki and of course research papers are quite good for getting this information, it may not apply to blender, but more than likely there will be way of cheating it.
If you learn how to control lighting, materials and rendering settings then you should be able to get all of the information you need from a render, with out layers.
It also helps you troubleshoot render issues 
Yafaray’s PNG’s are automatically saved with transparency if you use a plain background. Plus you have volumetrics, which is rather cool. Its also pretty fast.
I’d never thought of compositing the two. Cool idea.
ok, thanks Michael and Daniel, I will look into it…
Ever heard of vector blur?!
You can use the vector pass (and even z-depth if you need to) from BI with an image from yafaray.
Your tone makes it sound like you’re looking for excuses for this to not work. If your goal is to make it not work, then fine. But if you want to actually accomplish something, asking for help would be a better tactic then yelling accusingly like we’re trying to pull a fast one on you.