Ok. so ive been lookin around the forums and readin stuff and i keep comin across this thing called Yafray, and im like “what the shdizzle?”. so, if anyone can help me understand Yafray or just tell me what da heck it is and how 2 use it, that would b nice.
yafray is another renderer… so when you hit f12 you can have it fire up yafray instead of rendering using blender’s renderer.
yafray is better at global illumination and a bunch of other fancy effects that take blender some time, however yafray can be much slower [it’s a raytracer, blender’s a hybrid renderer [blender has a depth buffer, yafray doesn’t]]…
yafray doesn’t come with blender, and is developed by different people.
OK, you have to understand that the main part of Blender is the Modeler. That’s the part you see when you are placing objects and whatnot. The Modeler creates meshes, assigns textures, and positions them in a scene.
The other part is turning the scene into an actual picture. This is done by the Renderer. When you hit the F12 key or press the “Render” button, the renderer takes the meshes, textures, and scene, then outputs the pretty picture.
Blender actually comes with two renderers, the “built-in” renderer, and Yafray. Out of the box, Blender is set up to use the build-in renderer.
The build in one is pretty good, but there are some things it cannot do very well, or at all. The main thing is light refracting through cut glass (what they call “caustics”). Yafray does caustics and other goodies.
Unfortunately there are some things Yafray does not do, like procedural textures.
It is also possible to get a third party renderer, like RenderMan, and use it with Blender.
From my point of view (and very simply put), YafRay is all about light!
If you want your object to look REAL, click the YafRay “render button”.
If you want your object to look REAL, click the YafRay “render button”.
Indigo, indigo… 
Yafray is a great blend for an artist. It can let you do a lot of things that are hard to fake in blender, but still gives you a lot of artistic control.
Ian
That’s funny, I always thought the main part of Blender was the animation facilities 
… I know what you meant 
Is Povray faster / slower / better / worse than the Blender ‘ray’ option ?
Mi
WHoa! that 1 wit YaFRAY looks waaay better than the other. How can I use YaFray. I mean, how do I get 2 it and use it?
You can get the most recent version of Yafray here:
http://www.yafray.org/
Warning, it is not easy to use. Many times when you render the resulting image will be solid black, the lighting is tricky.
BlenderArt magazine vol 3 has tutorials on Yafray, you can download it here:
http://www.blenderart.org/download.html