Just a simple test I though I would do for fun. It went high over my expectacions! About 40 polys for the room, the ball is about 900 polys. Roughly 15 min render time…
Very cool render, though the render time seems awfully high compared to the standard blender renderer (though obviously I don’t know your specs).
Forgive me for asking , but is the integrated Yafray/blender build only for the Unix environment, or is there a windows binary?
Those binaries exist for Linux and Windows:
http://www.blender.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpBB2&file=viewforum&f=18
Just go to the sticky post of your choice.
Yes it is alot slower than the normal renderer, therefore it is not very suitable for animations, unless you have a massive render farm that is!
I have a 1.4 ghz machine running win2000. I used the 19/1/2004 build and Yafray 0.0.6 prerelease 2 from Yafray.org.
Just install the newest Blender build and this Yafray version, click ‘Yafray’ in the renderbuttons, then Render!
Lighting setup please 
Anyways I did testing with yafray, and if you only use direct lighting it is faster than blender’s raytracer.
In fact I’m doing a test right now, rendering the same picture with same settings in yafray and blender with the latest cvs. We’ll see the results.
For everyone who might be interested, here is the.blend file for the scene:
http://www.shadeless.dk/files/yafray_test3.blend
(it’s in layer 2, and it needs Yafray 0.06 and a new Blender build)
Erufailon: if you want you can post your image in this post, then it can turn into a sort of Yafray thread…
Test is done, it’s my dragon fountain.
Blender render:
Rendertime: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Yafray render:
http://web.axelero.hu/ceze1/yafray.jpg
Rendertime: 6 minutes (!!)
Notes:
1 sunlight, 8 OSA.
Water looks better on blender render due to 4 facts:
- light power doesn’t behave exactly the same in yafray, and as it’s lighter it reflects more light, makes it less transparent.
- Material’s diffuse reflection setting doesn’t behave the same neither, thus makes more light reflected as well. These two can be corrected by experimenting with the sliders.
- No stucci as far as I know in yafray, it uses a cloud texture instead.
- Normal mapping doesn’t behave exactly the same neither, have to experiment with the slider to get the right results.
In this test I didn’t touch anything before exporting to yafray, just clicked the yafray button and then the render button, so materials and lighting was optimised for blender, not yafray.
These problems are being worked on as far as I know.
Interesting that the camera’s lens changed a bit in yafray.
Conclusion:
If I had to create an animation that had reflections and refractions in it, I would choose yafray at this time
Thanks a lot man, I wouldn’t have worked that out on my own!
megamonster: no problem!
interesting… but the real thing I am wondering about is: How could it possobly take one and a half hours to render that scene in Blender? That is ridiculus! Here Blender is only seems a little slower than yafray for raytracing on simple scenes. If you have a complex model it might be different, I don’t know.
But interesting conclusion for sure! The point of having a selective rendering engine like Blender kind of disappears when it is slower than just using full raytracing through YafRay.
I don’t know, it slows down big time with antialiasing and raytracing and lots of vertices.
But I wouldn’t like to get rid of blender’s internal renderer, like… never. 
It has a certain quality, or feel, or whatever what you can’t reach with yafray. And without raytracing it definietly is faster, and it has toon shading which even commercial renderers lack mostly, unless you buy a specific toon renderer, and… and… it’s just different. So there is a point to it, but it’s not raytracing speed:) O, and don’t forget, the raytracer is wip in blender right now, it might get much faster later on.
Hey sure, I wasn’t suggesting that Blenders old renderer should be removed at all! I was just saying the raytracing capabilities are a bit too slow to be useful, especially since Yafray can do it faster.
I know Blenders raytracing is WIP, lets hope it gets faster!
Another test, 70 minutes:
I cranked the settings right up on this one. It took much much longer too! Strange though, the quality doesn’t seem much better, but it took 55 mins longer! Anyway, I think it looks nice.
For comparison, here is a Blender render with roughly the same settings:
Did you get those caustics from Blender, or did you edit the XML file?
Be aware that with a Raytracer render time can increase in powers if some ray are trapped inside surface. This mean that even a small change in one setting can make a render 10x longer.
More, here you seem to have cranked up photons, and that even worse than standard raytracing
The caustics are very good in the last one, and were not in previous ones
From Blender. No XML fidling or anything. Just Blender with Yafray installed. No nothing. No nonesence. (Which is the nice thing about it :D)
Yeah I guess you are right, I did set the photon settings very high on the last one. I used Yafray GI to render the scene with the Best setting, Pixel Presicion:1px, CauticDepth:8, Bouncelight Depth:8…
Oh yeah, and before anyone says anything, I want to point out these are just tests. I know its just suzanne in a simple scene!
I find this wierd that people find Blender’s raytracer slow, I rendered this image…
…which has about 60,000 verts if you count the subsurfing. Which took 5 mins to render at 2560X2280 size on a 600Mhz laptop. But I suppose there’s no photon options with blender’s raytracer, anyway just my babbling.
As long as you have not too much transparent, transluscent, refraction reflexion effect, Raytracing is only a little slower than scanline (normal blender) but when your rays start to be bended in all directions, things changes 
From Blender. No XML fidling or anything. Just Blender with Yafray installed. No nothing. No nonesence. (Which is the nice thing about it :D)
[/quote]
how the hell did you get them to work? i never got caustics to work in yafray, not a single time! they never show up! - its highly probably that im just a wee bit dim, please tell me what i have to do other than setting refraction in the mirror transp. panel… 
you need full gi turned on and a light source
That’s pretty much all. I even got caustics from indirect lighting. I can’t wait till direct photon lights get integrated.