Most effective way to render??

Hey, guys. I’ve got a couple of questions about rendering.

  1. Would Yafray be the best for a beginner?
  • I’ve heard that Yaftray has the most realistic lighting effects. I’ve done research concerning other renderers as well, but the only other one that surpasses Yafray was Indigo. Although Indigo has some of the most realistic images I’ve ever seen, Indigo is said to have EXTREMELY long render times because of the high quality. I’m not looking for something to render in minutes, but I don’t want the render to take forever.
  1. Does the secret to having a great render lie within having realistic textures?

One of the secrets to having a great render lies in color correcting the materials. See Tone and Gamma Corrections in my sig. Yafaray, Indigo, Sunflow, Lux and the rest use more physically correct light models, so they can do effects that either must be faked or cannot be done in Blender Internal, but if you don’t need the effects, BI can give you good renders a lot faster.

If you want an honest opinion. Try to learn more about the different parts of a render before looking for that magic Give me a Great Render Button.
It is the combination of lights, textures, shaders and postpro that gives perfect renders. Some renderes make certain things easier (like indigo helps a lot with correct lighting for realistic scenes) while others need tricks to achive the same result. Non the less it is essential to learn the basics and not too rely too much on the renderer to produce good results.

As a beginer, I would recommend just using the internal render system. It works well and is realitvely fast. You also get the AO system and nodes which you can not do in Yafray.

Yafray also does not support PNG files for maps. This was a real show stopper for me. I have so many maps already in the PNG format that I did not feel like going through the trouble to convert them all to TGA just to use a render engine that seems to be abandonded by it’s development community.

Ok. I agree with musk. And I understand what you’re saying too, Atom. It does seem as though Yafray has been basically abandoned. Will there even be a new release?

When I started out, I thought Yafray was the only way to go. It made what at the time was basically crap, look a little less crappy. BUT, this is only because I didn’t know how to CORRECTLY use BI or even Indigo. I thought, higher numbers for all settings will mean better results. This, of course, is a complete lie :slight_smile: The best thing you can do, is just mess with the settings, see what each setting does. I have seen some very realistic renders come out of BI, because those people know how to use their renderers.

Ok. I have too. Like mpan3’s compositing entry. (It’s on youtube if you haven’t seen it). I asked him what he used to render, and he said blender internal.

I found BI render quite excellent for an IN-built and also as overall renderer.
It will probably just get better, as all Blender’s app is growing in improvements. Yes, Yafray might not be developped further on, but someone around here suggested it could just be integrated into BI’s…
The only point i could find nicer: I would prefer to see BI in the form of an autonomous Batch renderer. Yet, i make that workaround by using several Blender apps simultaneously…

Most effective way to render??

F12

Holy smokes! I never knew about Indigo renderer… takes long but DAMN WORTH IT!!!

Damn, that’s exactly how I thought! Every single part of it… Yafray, higher settings…
I still love the BI though. It gives off some great effects from time to time.

Nevertheless I’d still like to try out Indigo. I have Indigo on my PC and installed that Blendigo thing ;). How do I get it to render to Indigo though?

Almux you can actually start Blender form the commandline without a ui for rendering. I think it is the -b switch but not sure at the moment. Take a look at the manual search commandline and you should be able to find it.