I’m pretty new to Blender, but have extensive experience with 3D through Cinema 4D, Lightwave, and Maya. I’m fascinated by all the choices of renderer available through Blender, and also how baroque they all are, with command-line interfaces common and a wide range of features and supported/unsupported textures, object-types and export formats.
With my previous programs, I was generally happy using the built-in renderer, since it would usually render scenes from the program best, however experience with the Lightwave aftermarket renderer FPrime has introduced me to the advantages (and occasional drawbacks) of different renderers.
Which brings me to my question: of the renderers I’ve seen referred to as working with Blender (Aqsis, Pixie, POV-Ray, YAFRay, and the native Blender renderer…have I missed any?), is there any repository explaining the pros and cons of working with them and Blender. Aside from the Blender native renderer, YAFRay seems the most integrated, but I gather from some comments that it’s not seamless–is there a list of known faults? How the heck do you decide what renderer to use? For example, on my latest Lightwave project, I bought FPrime because its motion blur was so superior to Lightwave’s native renderer and there was a lot of motion-blur in the project.
Well, I know Yafray doesn’t render particles. (At least I don’t think it does, could be wrong).
And Blender internal has no caustics or GI. I guess it all depends on what you want to render. Yafray tends to make prettier renders, but it is also much slower than Blender internal. I believe your list leaves out Indigo and Maxwell, dunno about others. A forum member here is working on a plug-in for Nvidia’s Gelato. Me looks forward to that, even though my current GPU won’t support it.
Well, I know Yafray doesn’t render particles. (At least I don’t think it does, could be wrong).
Q40: Are Blender Particles supported?
YafRay does support duplivert objects using particles though, with which you could try to emulate blender particles by parenting billboard planes with some alpha texture. Though this currently doesn’t work all that well because of the somewhat unstable alpha mapping in yafray which doesn’t always work.
Static particles for hair/fur do work without problems though.
have I missed any?
Alvaro.
Not yet, but one day igneus will be released with Blender support:
Then we will have volumetric rendering in Blender (among other things).
Currently, indigo (mentioned above) is the most exciting renderer in my book.
Koba