Blender Rendering Issues.

[chris20]

Hi All,

Just wondering what everyones thought are on a few issues I seem to have.

Currently Im using the internal blender renderer. Which is fine and works really nicely. But it does have its limitations. Most notably a lack of G.I. When I switch to using the yafray renderer which comes packaged with blender I seem to loose a lot of control of materials. Anything with a bump map doesnt seem to work and the preview in the materials doesnt seem to relate to what I get in my renders.

Is this yafray now very out of date? From what I read the workflow seem to be to export out of blender to a stand alone verison of yaf "a" ray. Or whatever other renderer you might choose.

Im having a go at lux at the moment but have the same problems with materials.

I think my biggest limitation comes from the fact im still running tiger on a mac. Something im a little hesitant to update at the moment. Im no tech guru so arnt really into seriously messing with OS systems or whatever.

Not really expecting anyone to give me all the answers to my problems. Just after more of a feel of how other people go about doing their renders.

Thanks in advance.
Chris

[tom120934]

About YafRay and Yaf(a)Ray :

YafRay is no-longer maintained, so it's not compatible "out of the box" with Blender since 2.46.

Yaf(a)Ray is a complete rewrite and is compatible with newest Blender releases. You need to use some 3rd party software, like QT (for the interface used to set Yaf(a)Ray within Blender) but otherwise it just works perfectly (I only tested in Windows but Yaf(a)Ray binaries are available for Linux and OS X)

So you should not consider using YafRay for a fresh project.

About shaders :

Shaders are completely different from Blender to Yaf(a)Ray. So it needs extra work if you never used it before, with the Yaf(a)Ray interface and not with Blender Materials panel. I wrote a tutorial about some basic shaders here : Tutorial : setting up Yaf(a)Ray shaders « Pixels or Atoms ?

YafRay was incompatible with some images formats (e.g. : PNG or TIFF) I don't know if the same apply for Yaf(a)Ray. You should test, I will asap.

About procedurals Blender textures, Yaf(a)Ray isn't compatible with every feature of Blender. Check documentation and check the mapping between Blender texture slots and Yaf(a)Ray's (they are described with the Yaf(a)Ray interface in Blender)

I hope it helps. I will be writing a tutorial shortly about starting up with Yaf(a)Ray.

[chris20]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the speedy reply. Very helpfull.

No support for tiff solves one problem straight up.

Just reading through the yaf a ray forums and seems OSX 10.4 isnt supported so I may have to upgrade sooner rather than later.

Looking forward to that tutorial.

Thanks
Chris

[tom120934]

What hardware are you using ? Intel Mac or PowerPC ?

If you're running Intel, what about using Windows through either BootCamp or a virtualized machine ? There is many draw backs : both solution needs extra disk space of course, BootCamp means double-boot so it's not as comfortable as single-OS setup, and virtualization implies a (slight) loss of performance. But it has this major pro : it separates your daily use of your computer from the CG work. I just hate the need to change a whole OS install just for a soft, so separating is always a good thing IMHO.

[Unicorn]

I believe kerkythea has a MAC OS X version. And the GUI for that renderer is very comprehensive and the materials editor is very powerful, but it's different.

I don't think there is a directly integrated version (There is a fork of Blender called Blender2KT but I think it's only for Windows), but I tend to use the GUI anyway. It's has some linited scene manipulation abilities - you can add primitives and lamps and you can move objects around add cameras and such.