Material preview with Yaf or Lux: possible?

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

The title says it all: is it possible to preview materials inside Blender using external engines like Yafaray or Luxrender?
If answer is negative, what is your workflow for fine-tuning materials without waiting hours for each material test?
Thanks and cheers!

2

I know Luxrender at least does not have a material preview, but when Luxrender starts rendering it generally does not take long to get an idea of what the material will be like (though covered in noise)

3

Thanks Ace Dragon, you are an hero around these forums.
May I ask you the reason why you chose LuxRender over Yafaray?
Looking at both websites the latter looks more feature packed, and it has also more rendering algorithms.

4

I guess one reason is that my first experiment with using external render engines was with SmallLuxGPU, I wanted to see what regular Lux can do so I went to that.

I chose Lux because it had decent support for Blender procedurals (as well as a small collection of Lux-exclusive ones), it has lighting that’s about perfect once you know the lamp/emitter settings and right default settings, and it looked to be getting some nice features in development like more light scattering settings and GPU rendering.

I do remember at one point where such unbiased rendering can even render out very difficult objects (like a Klein bottle)

5

Fair enough, thanks a lot mate!

6

I’m puzzled by this statement as there is a material preview option in LuxBlend’s material panel and as LuxBlend is a window within Blender I would say that is does.

7

I was talking about Luxblend25 (the one that’s tightly integrated in the UI without the need to go to a scripts window)