Hi.
I’ve been battling all day with getting Yafaray to work on Ubuntu 8.10…
…after ton’s of tips on google, yafaray forums on changing codes in
the scripts, modifications and all… I’ve finally gotten Yafaray to at least “work”.
But it renders with NULL materials… meaning …everything i render comes
out in pitch Black on a white background…
What am I doing wrong / or what must I do to render the materials?
Cheers,
JoOngle
You have to define the lights and materials in the Yaf(a)ray gui for them to show.
Thanks 
It took a while to figure out that you actually have to load an additional script
that is NOT loaded per default AND is hidden in /blender/source/blender/ which
have to be loaded and gotten every time I get another scene, but okay…it IS
experimental…
…not to mention that there now are 2 materials menues, first one must create it
in Blender - THEN discard that…because it isn’t used anyway (the colors), and
redo the colors in the SCRIPT menu…LOL… okay…it’s better than nothing I suppose.
It DOES render pretty fast though (remember to set threads to as many processors(cores) you have IN the script Render menu) And it looks soo milky and fluffy! 
typical yafray, but it has that charm
You could make an empty scene with the script already loaded and open that Scene or .blend file when you want to use Yaf(a)ray.
I have a panel icon that launches a short command line script that opens a .B.blend that I set up as my Yaf(a)ray default, and another similar one for plain Blender. It saves some time configuring windows and whatnot.
Quality is excellent once you get used to the setup, and, as you said pretty fast, considering it raytraces everything, and with GI if you want it. Direct Lighting with AO is awesomely fast.
The script should be in your User Preferences Render drop down and listed under Scripts => Render.
Yeah, the direct lighting rocks!
But the materials are pretty hard to match as the previews now are useless, I guess
that will come in time, but I had a pretty hard time eg…matching the toenail colors
in my character which even in the material editor of Yafaray looks pretty close…but
when rendered looks like a comic drag-queen paint-on 
I would have loved “Blurred” stochastic DOF though as in order to just get
somewhat reasonable noise free DOF…we need to set it to at least 60 samples
(as in this example) and then it takes 4-6 minutes to render it…
Creases doesn’t work either - you can see my character looks a bit blocky in
the above example, well…that’s because Yafaray only takes the BASE mesh and
subsurf - but not the crease/edge information 
I - Hope - that will come…
I do like the “mesh-light” option as it makes it very easy to make lightbulbs, that’s
nifty! 
And I must say the lights of it is impressive - I tried to adjust it with LEVELS in
The Gimp (just like I do with Photoshop at work)…but I couldn’t improve it 
Promising…
That still drives me insane about Yafaray. Often it brings in everything with a default white color. It seems to pick up some of your texture choices as well. I’m not sure if it picks up ALL of multiple texture sets.
Then it will work fine for one scene and not for another.
It is amazingly fast though. You can get Indigo-quality renders in an hour or less, depending on how you set your stuff up.
