Architecture work with Blender + Yafaray

[fenard]

Hi

 

I'm a young architect based in San Francisco using Blender and Yafaray to model my work. It's fine but I'm hitting huge rendering times (several hours for a high resolution image, up to 3 days).

 

Is it Yafaray related or do you experience such high rendering times with other software as well? I might have to switch to another toolchain perhaps ..

 

Thanks in advance!

 

best

 

luc

[alias_marks]

Hey Luc, welcome to the forums, I can't help ya but maybe someone can chime in. You'll find there a few blender heads here, but I would definitely recommend posting up your question up on http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/ if you haven't already.

 

Cheers,

 

Mike

Fellow SF 3d-ite.

[Lyubomir Kovachev]

For the last few months I tested 8 external render engines for Cinema 4D, and 4 of them are available for Blender as well:

 

Luxrender, Octane, Indigo, Thea Render

 

Octane is excellent for small scenes (interiors) but not for large outdoor scenes, because there's no instancing and it has to load the meshes into the video card memory, and that cuts down the usable scene complexity even more. And it's not very useful for animations, as it drops the live connection too often and crashes a lot, so the chances for successful overnight rendering are very slim. And you need a fast Nvidia CUDA videocard for it.

 

I found Luxrender much slower than Thea and Indigo, so I didn't test it any further.

 

Indigo is very good - almost full featured, stable and reasonably fast (for an unbiased renderer at least).

 

And finally, Thea Render, has everything Indigo has, plus a very good second biased render engine, and a better price. Thea has fast translucency, fast instancing, fast and full featured unbiased and biased engines, and it's quite stable and easy to use. Thea is not as well integrated into Blender as Yafaray, but it has an exporter, and it has its own studio interface with interactive preview (ala Modo) that makes material tweaking and lighting much more interactive actually.

 

I can't comment on Yafaray and the 3 days of rendering, I am a beginner in visualization myself and it all depends on the scene, but my speculation is that Thea is faster than that. A quick look at Yafaray feature list suggests it is a bit lacking in features as well.

 

I personally went with VRay for my Cinema 4D, but for Blender I think Thea wins. And my humble advice would be to start your search from Thea