POV-Ray vs. Yafray

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

I’ve downloaded both POV-Ray and Yafray, and I only have room to keep one of them. The question is, I don’t know which one. I’ll list the strong and weak points of both, but for Yafray I’ll have to go strictly from the documentation, as I haven’t gotten it to work yet.

POV-Ray strong points:

  1. Relative ease of use
  2. Powerful built-in textures
  3. Familiarity (first 3D program I’ve ever seen, one of the first I’ve used)
  4. Well established

POV-Ray weak points:

  1. Difficult to find scripts/programs to export to POV-Ray
  2. When working with Blender, the Y and Z axes are switched
  3. Virtually impossible to effectively use a background image
  4. Difficult, if not impossible, to make a texture that will show shadows and nothing else

Yafray strong points (as taken from the manual and artwork I’ve seen):

  1. Possible to use background image
  2. Possible to acheive results similar to the “only shadow” feature in Blender

Yafray weak points:

  1. Completely and utterly confusing
  2. Weak texturing options
  3. Relatively new, and from what I can tell still in the beta stages

So which do you, the community, recommend?

2

PovAnim by JMS.

Check the script list thread in the proper forum.

Martin

3

If you want my opinion, I’d recommend sticking with Yafray. Mainly because the integration with Blender is getting better and better by the day, and also development on Yafray is continuing at a fast pace.

Given a few months, I have a feeling that Yafray will be light years ahead, especially in terms of using it with Blender…

4

Just a word : no_image…


// Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer Scene Description File

#version 3.5;
#include "colors.inc"

// ----------------------------------------

camera {
  location  <0.0, 0.5, -4.0>
  direction 1.5*z
  right     x*image_width/image_height
  look_at   <0.0, 0.0,  0.0>
}

sky_sphere {
  pigment {
    gradient y
    color_map {
      [0.0 rgb <0.6,0.7,1.0>]
      [0.7 rgb <0.0,0.1,0.8>]
    }
  }
}

light_source {
  <0, 0, 0>            // light's position (translated below)
  color rgb <1, 1, 1>  // light's color
  translate <-30, 30, -30>
}

// ----------------------------------------

plane {
  y, -1
  pigment { color rgb <0.7,0.5,0.3> }
}

sphere {
  0.0, 1
  texture {
    pigment {
      radial
      frequency 8
      color_map {
        [0.00 color rgb <1.0,0.4,0.2> ]
        [0.33 color rgb <0.2,0.4,1.0> ]
        [0.66 color rgb <0.4,1.0,0.2> ]
        [1.00 color rgb <1.0,0.4,0.2> ]
      }
    }
    finish{
      specular 0.6
    }
  }
  no_image
}

[/quote]

5

That will come in handy, but I was trying to get something like hitting “only shadow” for the plane material. I can’t find anything in the documentation that would get that effect, though.

6

Why not?
In next povanim version, perhaps…

7

There’s other renderman out there you tried Aqsis at http://www.aqsis.com/

8

I’m curious about the renderman stuff: it looks like Aqsis doesn’t do raytracing, or GI and so on. Is there much benefit from renderman rendering over Blender’s internal renderer for the casual user like me?

9

Yes, it’s much better. I don’t think its a raytracer, more like a POV type engine. But I render out a RIB and it looks very good and yes it does shadows.

10

Why not?
In next povanim version, perhaps…

no_image on the plane prevents it from showing the shadow, too. I did some checking on the POV-Ray message board, and apparantly the algorithm doesn’t allow for a shadow only texture/pigment.

So Yafray gains some more points. It just needs a built-in GUI and I need to find an export script that doesn’t give a “No OS” error.

11

There is a GUI, two of them, but there is also Ayam, which is allot smaller then K-3D

12

This kind of effect is perhaps possible with mlpov0.83 and pattern projection from a point…

13

Just a short question : how ?

14

Just a short question : how ?

I was just basing this off of artwork I’ve seen. I can’t get Yafray to work, so I haven’t gotten anything to work. It may have been a textured plane, but it blended in so perfectly with the background image that I thought the “Only Shadow” option was possible in Yafray.