YafaRay GSoC beta testing in progress

Hi there,

The GSoC projects are already delivering beta releases for everyone to test. We would like to have you help to betatest the new features.

We need help as well to produce binaries of these betas to be ran on different OS, particularly on Windows and Mac. Thanks in advance for your help. More info at www.yafaray.org

The projects which have delivered betas so far are:

wow, I don’t see all these projects I found the 2.50 intergration project through another thread but I have not seen these others. I am guessing you guys did pretty good for your first GSOC. I am off to try out the irradiance cache one.

Cool to hear that YafaRay has GSOC projects too. B25 integration looks good. :slight_smile:

What’s the difference between progressive photon mapping and photon mapping?

Progressive Photon Mapping can render large numbers of photons in several passes, so it is more accurate, and uses less memory than rendering the large numbers of photons in a single pass.

about the last image, took 1h and 35 min, it’s kind of sad these rendertimes/quality, I always loved Yafaray when I played in 2.4x, but looks like they missed the last train in the rendering competition (luxrender and others…)

I know, an hour to make only 1000 passes…

With an unoptimised beta tester…

With a render method that is probably not intended to be used alone…

:rolleyes:

Thanks for your uninformed and insensitive post towards a bunch people who have been working hard during the last months to finish these projects. The only competition we have lost is educating idiots like you in the free sotfware culture. STFU if you don’t have anything constructive to say here, please.

i wouldn’t respond like that. i would omit the last “please” :slight_smile:

edit:
note the quotation marks

Nope. I’m a bit fed up of lot of users here who take what we do for granted, and do little in return. Stupid comments is the last thing I can bear up to here. Showing appreciation or/and posting constructive criticism is the minimun you can do if you decice to participate in this thread. If not, shut up and get to participate in the community of the engine you like the most.

We are not running any competition. We are sharing our work with a whole community of users, and we ask for little in return.

Are all the new GSOC projects accessible through the 2.5 integration gsoc?

I agree with Alvaro, he is just venting his frustration. People are too quick to post negative comments when Alvaro politely asked for help to test the GSOC projects. Personally I wasn’t even aware of the Yafaray GSOC projects.

Every student has been working on their own fork of yafaray 0.1.2. We will merge all these projects in the YafaRay 0.1.3 release. I can not say whether YafaRay 0.1.3 will have a good and finished Blender 2.5 exporter.

Unfortunately the Blender 2.5 exporter is not complete yet, there are a couple of serious limitations, which are backwards compatibility and progress of rendering, mainly due to the uncomplete and unstable nature of Blender 2.5. We want to make a rocking Blender 2.5 integration and we will stick to this commitment; it is just too soon yet.

However the result is free of noise and even has very little in the way of blotchiness.

I would say that’s quite a decent time for such a smooth result considering it has a blurry reflection with the floor (free of noise as well) and a realistic glassy object.

I advise you shouldn’t even touch unbiased rendering if that’s your mentality;)

I’m not sure if I’ve done something wrong while installing but I couldn’t get the 2.5x Yafaray add-on working, I’ll try again tomorrow (It’s am here so to tired to mess around) and post the results.

Basically though Yafaray wasn’t appearing in the add-ons window and I was getting a hell of a lot of errors on start-up, I am using Blender 2.53 Beta 64-bit.

Anyway, the developers have done an awesome job, I’m looking forward to testing the builds out :slight_smile:

The irradiance cache branch, anyone know if he implemented other methods to make the render more smooth. cuz his image looks really good for a 1m30s render!

There is still visible low frequency noise on diffuse surfaces, but it’s able to solve caustics much better than the current one-pass caustic photon map. This is important since in many scenes, caustics become the main lighting component. For instance in a indoor scene where light is coming in through a windows glass with IOR. In this case and without resorting to fake transparent shadows, all lighting becomes caustic phenomena.

In the future is possible that we can make combinations, for instance solving the caustics and the SSS maps progressively, and solving the diffuse map with a fast one-pass photon map.

Yes, another technique that could benefit from the progressive approach is the SSS shader, which is photons-based, but needs large amount of photons like the caustic maps. I hope we can integrate both techniques in the future.

Ryen has been in contact with the paper’s author all the time, and I think he has suggested a different strategy, which is more passes and less photons per pass.

Besides, the algorithm can be improved with importance shooting of photons; this is an improvement other parts of yafaray can benefit from, such as the SSS shader and ‘traditional’ photon mapping, and it is in our list of TODO things, apart from other improvements for all PM techniques we would like to implement.

Nice !
Alvaro we should ask jens from the Luxrender to help with compiling for osx?

Cool, congrats to all the Yafaray devs and all the GSoC studens, nice progress so far :slight_smile: Interesting to see all these additions evolve post-GSoC.

It’s unfortunate the GSoC 2010 “Raytraced Motion Blur” didn’t get accepted though :confused:
But perhaps someone skilled and generous enough picks up this project in his/her free time (hope so).

Next year I think much of our work will go towards movie-production oriented features, and that will include GSoC projects if we get accepted again as mentoring org.

We did not get any solid proposal for motion blur this year. It is a very difficult project because it requires changes through all source code to make yafaray aware of time factors.