I notice some of the nicer images on this site have used Yafray and Yablex to process Blender images. What are these programs and anyone have a quick overview? (I visited their sites, but am new to 3-d). How does one use them on Blender images and can you re-import any of their output back to Blender for animating, etc.? It looks like GIMP is a sort of freeware Photoshop; How does it compare to Photoshop for use in Blender?
I know my question is a bit vague. If anyone uses the above programs with Blender on a regular basis, can they give a ForDummies type overview?
Yafray is what’s known as a renderer. It takes a 3D scene full of objects, lights, etc. (defined mathematically inside the computer) and calculates how the light hits the surfaces, how the materials look, where the camera is, what it’s pointing at, and produces a final image from that information.
There is a renderer built inside of Blender of course, that renders the scene information inside of Blender to an image, but yafray is a newer and more technically advanced (though slower) renderer than Blender’s internal one, so some people have been exporting their Blender scenes to render in yafray.
Yable is a python script that is used to convert your Blender scene into a language that yafray understands, so that yafray can render your scene (instead of the standard Blender internal renderer).
what broken told about yaf / yable is right.
tell me, if you want a more technically answer
but for example glass is very hard to fake in blender, yafray is able to render it, with caustics and all - nearly the same with reflexions and metal … maybe the most interessting advantage of yaf is hdri, the usage of images as lightsources - looks really great
gimp is quite like photoshop, so it can be used for postprocessing or for painting textures.
the bigest advantage of gimp, beside its freeware ;), is the speed.
qiv says to ask if I want more technical detail. Yes, thanks for the offer, that would be great. Can Yafray make animations with the images it renders? How hard is it to learn (say, compared to Blender).
This is an excellent forum and the willingness of the more advanced users to help is impressive.
There are a number of programs that will take a set of images ( frames ) and turn them into an animation. The highly useful MJPEG Tools, for example, contains utilities to do just that.
The real question is do you have the time? A 5 minute animation at 30 frames/second is 9000 frames. If you can render 1 frame/second, this takes 2.5 hours. If your raytraced frame takes 1 minute, the time jumps to 150 hours.
In once sense, this is a business problem in that you can throw piles of money at it and reduce the effect. Build a renderfarm like the major animation studios or buy a cryogenically cooled supercomputer.
Blender started life as a raytracer, but when they started doing commercial animation work that just did not make economic sense.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not knocking raytracing. Raytracers produce beautiful images although they are not the End All-Be All in realism that some people think.
One creative option with blender is to raytrace a background image and animate over the top of it. Check out rotoscoping in the manual. You do have the manual, right?
- looks really great