Trying Yafaray. I like it alot. 
(YafaRay)
Testing Archimesh, Window Generator 2, and Yafaray some more. (Forum resizer destroyed the image quality.)
I was saving this model until I thought I could render it well, and with Yafaray I think I can. This is a WIP though.
YafaRay! 
Brilliant engine! :yes:
It is! 
I really like it so far. How does it compare to Vray?
It’s REAL close in terms of quality, but nowhere near as fast. 
Yea. I kind of figured that. I tried Yafaray to see if it was faster than Cycles (since I am stuck with an AMD for now) and it way faster. The images it renders seem to be the same quality and with mostly no noise.
Yeah, it’s faster than Cycles in most cases, but you can easily make a noisy scene in Yaf with the wrong settings 
Are you using photon mapping?
I have not yet. I tried it on the box scene but it looked weird.
The photoreal interiors and stuff you see made in YafaRay is mostly photon mapping. Download the demo files at Yaf’s website too and dig around some The user manual is there somewhere too, in PDF, well worth a look, it really explains what everything does and why.
Okay. I will try it out. So far Yafa has been really easy to use, but I would like to get more advanced.
Do be reminded that in Yafaray, when using photon mapping, the accuracy of your GI will be affected by the size of the photons being shot, so small details and large scenes may either require a lot of photons for an accurate rendition or you might get artifacts (finding shortcuts as the expense of bias was one of the reasons we have photon mapping today). I know there was a project with Yafaray in terms of using the beefed up SPPM technique, but I don’t know if that was ever committed to the engine (I wonder if it’s related to the reason why they only did one GSoC period for it).
Don’t get me wrong, Photon mapping does indeed have its strengths like its ability to quickly render out caustics, but do note that photon mapping is basically a shortcut for GI because it involves rendering out disks of light that are then softened out through final gathering.
The fact that these are not rendered as single, miniscule points of light mean that scenes like interiors can be rendered much faster and without any real noticeable decline in illumination quality in spite of the facts that…
-The illumination detail might be a bit less than that of path traced images due to the size of the photons, but the fact that sizes are adjustable mean that you can trade off speed for illumination detail and memory overhead.
-Caustics can also be somewhat blotchy in some scenes unless the photon size for caustics is very small, in short, you also trade off in that the higher caustic detail requires longer render times and more memory.
-Depending on the photon size, you will find out that you will need walls with real thickness for interiors, thin walls in contrast may lead to parts of photons hitting the outside being rendered inside the room, something which is known as ‘light leaking’, some newer techniques like those used in Thea have found ways to largely solve this for photons, but I don’t think such a technique exists in Yafaray. (the main way to reduce light leaks otherwise is just to use smaller photons).
-Larger-scale scenes may very well require more photons, because they need to cover a much larger area.
Hope this helps to explain things. 
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