Can some body list the differences between the different renderers for me?
Yafray… blender internal… don’t know whatto use… I have been using blender interal only for now.
What i mostly do is interior design.
You may want to look at indigo, it’s unbiased so if you give it enough time it’ll give you a very realistic image. I’ve seen quite a few good renders of flats and houses.
Best way of finding out differences is to look at galleries for each, and see which gives the types of results you want.
Indigo takes longer to render in most cases, but can be a lot quicker for complex caustics. I recall a render for a glass of whisky with ice that took over 40 hours to render because it needed a high ray depth, it should have taken a lot less time in Indigo. It also has the advantage of having a result at every moment as well as very early first images (well under a minute).
I find it quicker overall because instead of spending time messing with various parameters, tuning photons and the like, I hit “go”. I can see quickly if something is wrong, correct it and re-render. If the render looks OK, I just leave it to carry on.
It’s also embarrassingly parallel, so if you’ve got a few machines it really speeds things up.
Oh, and I’d second Kerky, it’s a good renderer too.
Every renderer has its advantages and disadvantages. Try them out and decide which works best for you!
Blender internal is quite nice now.
Yafray is nice too, but only for still images the GI makes random noise to defeat anyone from using it for animation.
PovRay is nice too, I really wish we had a built in exporter, they have a native 64 bit build for windows X64. even teh 32 bit version is quite nice when you get used to how it works.
Has a good exporter script as well.
Actually Indigo IS nice - but on the other hand, it is really SLOW compared to a properly setup biased rendering engine like Yafray or Kerkythea. Even with caustics. And not to mention with indoor scenes where noise takes extremely long to be bannished from the image. At least in my recent tests - if anyone has some tricks up their sleeves, it would be great to hear them!
Also, I think the tight integration of Yafray is still a great advantage and Yafray is still very able to do fantastic images!
The recent addition of exit portals provides a huge speedup in enclosed areas with some holes (windows, etc). Something I was doing yesterday got a 3x speedup.
It can be faster with complex caustics because the classic methods of faking it don’t scale all too well.
Yafray & blender internal have a large advantage of not being true to life (particularly bi), because as an artist you may not want photorealism.
As far as I know the latest additions by Broken were made to not be physically correct because he wanted to give more control to the artist, so BI has some features implemented with more control to the artist in mind.