Yafray?

I downed and went thru the trouble of installing yafray, and I really didn’t see anything worth getting about it. It took a lot longer to render and it didn’t seen to use images as skins.

Wat does yafray do or what is it supposed to do?

try out yafaray it the newer branch of yafray. anyways yafray is a proper raytracer unlike BI which is a mixture of a scanline renderer that uses raytracing to work out some things. Yafray comes into its on when you use the global illumination features the are few tuts that explain how to use it check them out.

i think it opens up different rendering options too when yafray is on instead of BI in the scene buttons

If your textures are not JPG try converting them to JPG.

Yafray is a more for realistic renderings. The model it uses to deal with light more accurately reproduces real world results. Refraction, sub-surface scattering, caustics, depth-of-field, etc. are good examples.

Yafray is pretty much dead though. (que for flames from yafray fans…) For opensource rendering engines, LuxRender looks like it is on the way to replace it. It already supports more features, but is still working to tweak out the quality and optimization. And of course there are renderman clones like Pixie or Aqusis which can do some pretty realistic renderings.

Yaf(a)ray is the new incarnation of Yafray. You can find more info on it here. Binaries are available here: The good thing with Yaf(a)ray is that it is blindingly fast and it looks much better than Blender Internal.

Its not biased so its faster than LuxRender (though this may change as LuxRender has come on in leaps and bounds). Interestingly enough, people from LR were in talks with Y(a)R to see if they could combine Yafarays fast biased renderer with LuxRenderer’s biased solution. Now THAT would have been cool! Sadly nothing came of it. But LuxRenderer is toying with adding a biased system for real speed - so who knows?

The main problem with Yafaray is the developers are trying to pretty much keep stuff under wraps, which I don’t understand - but its far from dead!

Nothing ever really came from the LuXRender devs talking to Yaf(a)ray devs. Only one dev was really active in creating Yaf(a)ray, and even he hasn’t been working on it for quite a while now. It remains to be seen if he picks it bakc up. A couple of y(a)r dev seemed mildly interested, but none of them have time / motivation to do anything.

So LuxRender devs implemented biased rendering on their own. The 0.5 release offers biased mode. It’s probably not as good or fast as Yaf(a)ray yet, but at the speed they are developing, I think they may match or surpass it by the next release. Plus, it has native support for all of Blender’s shaders and procedural textures.

I’m still pretty new at photorealistic rendering and have come to appreciate the BI, yafray (haven’t tried Yafaray though) and luxrender.

BI is a quick and dirty way of checking how your model is coming along…but that’s about it if you’re after pr renders.
Yafray does a much better job with the lights, etc but I though it was a bit of a shame that you can’t see any results before it’s done and pops up something…it’s nice to know 12 hours earlier that you remembered to pick the right camera.
I think a BIG plus for luxrender is the native support for distributed rendering. Got an office or a few other machines kicking around? It takes 10sec to open a command window and pop in the “luxrender -s -t2” to prep it to help out on your latest render.

Aside from figuring that out I still pretty much suck since I’m still learning how to make my own texture maps instead of spending my time on lighting etc. One step at a time. I sure wish there was a better integration for luxrender to the blender interface. It’s a shame the material settings already chosen in blender can’t be used…this just leaves room for mistakes and confusion

Huh? How do you come to such a conclusion? I found the Yafaray developers pretty open about what they are doing currently.

Yafray does a much better job with the lights, etc but I though it was a bit of a shame that you can’t see any results before it’s done and pops up something…it’s nice to know 12 hours earlier that you remembered to pick the right camera.

  1. Train your self to make test rendering before the final render.
  2. Use 50% or 25% renders to check overall aspect of your render and lighting in tests stage.
  3. User ‘border’ in high resolution to see before hand how details will look like in your final render.
  4. Keep sampling and antialiasing settings low until you start to produce the final results.
    3a. Use ‘irradiance cache’ in any YafRay 009 GI method.
  5. Plan ahead what lighting method are you going to use for your scene. Path tracing and Bidirectional are optimised for scenes with a good lighting distribution (high key lighting) and outdoors. Bidirectional and photons+FG can be used for scenes with Low-key lighting and indoors.
  6. If you want caustic effects, try to render them always with caustic photons. Sometimes you need raytracing, direct lighting and caustics but you dont need global illumination, for instance in a fluids animation, in YafRay/Yaf(a)Ray you can do that, learn how.
  7. Unless your are rendering a complex scene in high resolution, long render times has never been the point of YafRay renders. YafRay aim has been always high quality fast raytracing.
  8. Use Yaf(a)Ray.

Might be worth watching this video on google I made a while ago, may help?

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-6971207047837035225
RoyTheArtist