following on a bit from my posts on the povanim poll thread (i didn’t want to take it too far away from the original subject!)
when I’ve seen a lot of yafray renders, before I really look closely at them, my brain tells me “real”. With other renderers like POVray for example, I’ve never had that.
Some people pointed me to very very real looking pov pics, and even some amazing blender pics - although I couldn’t say why, my instinctive thought was still “computer”.
Has anyone else noticed the same thing? And if so, is Yafray doing some over and above the other renderers, or is it just coincidence?
in my eyes, i see povray as nice, shiny clean, raytraced renders. Maybe this is why you see them as ‘computer generated’, whereas the slight grain from yafray give it a more realistic, photographic feel…
I’ve noticed the same thing. I think it boils down to global illumination (illuminating skysphere). I’ve seen renders from other packages that are just an untextured model and a skysphere that look “real” to my brain. It seems that almost everything rendered in Yaf uses this feature. Very few things that I see rendered in POVRay use this. The grain doesn’t hurt, but I think it’s the fast, easy implementation of the skysphere illumination that does it.
Of course, this is also why I almost always light my final Blender renders with the fake GI sphere.