first of all, i’m not asking for which one’s the best…but what advantages each has.
so far, of the only two renderers i’ve ever tried, i’m really loving yafray due to it’s ability to utilize four cores. is this possible in the blender internal engine?
as for what i do with blender: lately i’ve been trying to get caustics with water and glass working in yafray if you haven’t already seen my thread in this forum.
i really dont know the next thing i’ll do with blender. but i do know this: i’ll be exploring liquid simulation and caustics for a long time:)
and can somebody explain to me the difference between an integrated and, well, non-integrated engines?
Blender Internal: very fast, can use up to 8 cores (Scene Context>Rendering Subcontext>Output Panel in a button that says threads), completely integrated, fast development rate (next release includes soft raytraced shadows, glossy reflections and refractions including anisotrophy, QMC sampling for ambient occlusion, a mode for ambient occlusion in which object colors are considered (like global illumination!), new faster radiosity, caustics; in the future there might be a micropolygons), integrated with Blender’s compositor.
Yafray: has global illumination, caustics, dipersion
Indigo: unbiased, which means that all you have to do is put in a sun or lamp and it will render it photorealistically
Luxrender: same as above but open source, has support for pausing renders and adding and removing cores during rendering
Kerkythea: nice global illumination renderer, complete gui
what’s the deal with progressive rendering anyway? are people that eager to see part of their render? i mean, it’s not like you can stop a render half way (which would save me a lifetime of…time)
just a couple moments ago i was all excited to compare the render times between four and one thread but i seem to get a slower render time with four threads :eek:wtf!?
Progressive rendering isn’t important when working with fast renders, but when a single frame takes 20 hours to generate, I think it is pretty neat to have progressive rendering.
just a couple moments ago i was all excited to compare the render times between four and one thread but i seem to get a slower render time with four threads :eek:wtf!?
two possible reasons comes to mind: 1.make sure you actually have 4 physical cores on the CPU, hyperthreading doesn’t count
2. Each core needs its own section to render, so to effectively use 4 cores, you need to split up the render to at least 2x2. (xparts/ypart setting)
I might be wrong, but last I heard there were only going to be faked refractive caustics in blender internal in the next release, if even that. I’ve heard about this mythical colour-bleeding ambient occlusion mode, but haven’t yet seen any evidence of it.
The point of progressive rendering is that the renderer will just keep going for ever, adding more and more samples. You can stop it when you think it looks good enough. With a non-progressive renderer, you would set a number for the samples per pixel or some other criteria, and it does the whole thing at once. If it’s not good enough, you have to increase the samples value and start it again.
