Thank you for your time. Which renders more realistically, using Blender Yafray or Povray? Which has the most advantage when using Blender? Please advice.
God bless,
Alvin
when using blender (as you said) - yafray. it’s much more intergrated and easy to use.
According to pure photorealism, I think Povray is closer than Yafray or the internal renderer of Blender. But even with the internal renderer you can achieve shots pretty close to photorealism if you care about texturing and details.
Anyway, even the best renderer in the world wouldn’t let you achieve photorealism if you don’t pay attention to all details of all sort (texturing including dirtying and scratch maps, lighting, clutterness of the scene, sligh beveled edges and much much much more).
So, IMHO, photorealism is much more a matter of personal time put into a scene than the raw capability of a renderer.
Sure, it helps, though 
I like POV a lot… but i think the best renderer is RADIENCE by Greg Ward…
Ward is responsible for a lot of algorithms that make path traced GI practical, like irradience caching, gradient caching, etc.
Having used POV-Ray since 1997, and now using Yafray exclusively with Blender, I can confidently say that POV-Ray is a much more well-rounded renderer than Yafray, but Yafray is better for working with Blender.
But if you have the navigational skills of a lost cat, then try JMS’s Povanim script, which allows Blender to export to POV-Ray’s .pov and .inc files.
Purely for photorealism, they are pretty much similar. Yafray gets you good results with relatively little tinkering, but POV-Ray can be extremely realistic if you spend some time tweaking its myriad of options.
But if you have the navigational skills of a lost cat, then try JMS’s Povanim script, which allows Blender to export to POV-Ray’s .pov and .inc files.
having tried that for a while, I can tell you one thing: povanim is not really practical. The features it has displayed in the ui aren’t half implemented. And when you try and do animations, it creates a whole subset of .pov files per frame.
So on that note, if you’re looking for something good animation-wise, don’t use povray. I tried it, and gave up. Luckily yafray’s capable of running from withing blender without needing to export to .xml files.
And one thing to remember in this case too, is that Yafray is very very much younger than Povray. Let it catch up feature wise, and math-wise. A few people I know have talked about trying to speed up the code in yafray… But they’ve yet to get their act together. Once it’s started though, expect something as fast as povray in the end.
Cheers