This is not a spectacular test, but I never really realized the capability of yafray’s gi…
This is a 45 second render.
And the 45 second blender internal.
I’m not saying BI is bad – in fact, I think it has a lot of untapped potential – but yafray sure seems efficient.
EDIT: Just experimenting, and I found that I came up with this result using nodes and no raytracing (BI):
The yafray one looks more realistic, but oddly I like the BI version better.
Which one?:eyebrowlift2:
Oh middle one, and unlike Indigo (I know big difference) the color from the cube doesn’t seem to propagate (right word?) to the spheres.
I’m no indigo pro though, but I’ve started a render with roughly the same setup and the cube color showed up on both spheres and the floor plane. I used the default sky&sun thing since I never got any of the other options to work 
I’ll post it later just for comparison’s sake.
Yeah I agree, indigo seems to have good results but i find that in many unbiased renderers the colour bleeding (or you could say 'propagate:eyebrowlift2:) is a bit overdone. In most real life situations it seems to be very subtle…
of course, that could be the fault of the artists.
Another faked AO (attempt) coming up…
Unlike the Blender material settings indigo doesnt seem to support the whole “Ambient” feature, which would allow for “controlled” color bleeding. Or at least I think it would. Or did I not understand the concept of the indigo renderer? 
Well, I dont know… I don’t think that’s what ambient lighting does, it just adds a general ambient colour to the scene…
But anyway, here’s another render, pure blender internal, no raytracing, one lamp. 11 sec. render.
Well it seems the bolor bleeding disappears as the render goes along I left it to bake for the night and here’s what i got.
Hey, that’s pretty cool. Too bad it took overnight:p.
Another fake AO test. Pure blender internal, no raytracing, 11 second render.
Nice,…how dyou manage that shape out?
…Not sure I understand what you’re asking here…
What did you create that shape?
I used the discombobulator script…(mesh>scripts>discombobulator). It’s really nothing special. Anybody can do it.
EDIT: Besides, the model isn’t the point here… its the fake AO…
Colour bleeding in B.I can be done by having either having soft blurry reflections on everything, or just a clever light setup.
True that… colour bleeding isn’t an exact calculation like caustics (or at least you can’t tell if it is.) I bet low-energy area lights pointing away from the object would have a similar effect…
Or by using one of the two SVN builds over at Graphicall that allow AO to include object colors in the shading . . .
You probably already know this but i’ll say it anyway for other peoplee reading this,
Yeah, its even better now that some of the svn’s have proper area lights now, instead of just area shadow casting lamps. If you disable the shadow, on the area lamp, and make it really short distance and low intensity, you can use 6 area lamps to make a sort of light box around the desired object causing colour bleeding, effectivly making the area inside emit it a very fait light, effectivly a fake sort of caustics
its especially good with buildings
I’ve read about the new Area Lamp, but haven’t used it yet.
I never thought about it’s use for better ‘fake color bleeding’ . . . thanks for the tip.
I didn’t know that there was actual proper AO colour bleed, thanks for that tip, i’ll have to download that now.
You should check out most of my works… Specially the latest ones. I always try to avoid AO or any sort of GI… I use Spots… tons of spots… I feel they give me quick control to get very specific things and still look pretty good for non GI. Look at this for instance http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=111845 … Thats just Spots there.
Ofcourse if you are going to render some “glass / shiny” stuff … you dont propably have choice but to go with proper raytracing. But i am more after “Film” stuff. So cant really afford that unless its baked.
