I am trying to render a small space battle scene with a couple of fighters, ships, maybe even an asteroid and a planet. I am hoping to make it a quick animation of two minutes tops but first things first.
Now here’s the dilemma.
I want to render glass canopies and more realistic alloys and steels, all of this requires reflection, refraction and the like. Blender handles that poorly, whereas the ray-tracer Yafray does it well.
Second, and in no way less important, I want to render fog media. With something that can be represented as fog, I can easily manipulate it into explosions, engine exhaust, nebula, etc. The best tool for this is Blender’s halo material. However, Yafray doesn’t support Blender’s halo.
I need the voice of experience to get me past this hurdle (assuming it can be done of course.) I prefer a solution that works for Yafray mostly because Yafray renders better images (no offense meant to Blender, but with the same amount of work a ray-tracer will always render a more realistic scene than a scan-line renderer.) Is there a way to render fog media in Yafray? Or, failing that, is there a way to render realistic glass and metal in Blender’s internal scan-line renderer?
I appreciate it.