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Yafaray
Yafaray is a ray-tracing rendering engine that uses the Monte Carlo method (which depends on random sampling to speed along computations) in calculating a scene's light.
Strengths [Weaknesses]
Farm-Supported
Yafaray is a fairly well-known renderer and some commercial render farms officially support it, so you can submit jobs and have Yafaray work for you in the “cloud”.
Features
Yafaray has a number of optimisations to help you get good performance without relying on OpenCL or CUDA. It has advanced features like volumetrics, several texture types, and various illumination types.
Easy Setup
Yafaray is a serious renderer, and yet quite simple to set up with Blender.
Weaknesses [Strengths]
Big
Yafaray is a serious, professional renderer. If you're just learning how to model or light, it might be overkill as an initial rendering engine since it may produce unexpected results if you don't understand the rendering process. A simple “never fail” renderer, like Blender's inbuilt default, might be better to start on.
Install
Installing Yafaray broadly requires, like other renderers, the installation of the Yafaray base package, and then the plugin that will make it useful in your application of choice (probably blender).
To get the basic Yafaray package installed, install yafaray from http://slackbuilds.org. You may as well install the Python bindings, as well, whether or not you think you need it:
BUILDPYTHON=yes ./yafaray.SlackBuild
Once the dependencies are installed, install the yafaray-blender plugin from http://slackbuilds.org.
Blender
The default behaviour of the Yafaray SlackBuild is to install the Blender plugin into the standard /usr/share directory, and then link the plugin to where SlackBuilds.org actually installs Blender: /opt/blender.
Unless you have customised your install locations, all of this is acceptable and you don't need to do anything.
Usage
The Blender plugin, which can be activated and used the same as any other Blender plugin:
- Activate the Blender plugin in the User Preferences panel → Render. (There is no need to install the plugin as you might other Blender addons, because the LuxRender installer from SlackBuilds has already installed it for you.)
- Make it your active renderer in the Info panel
See Also
Blender
Mitsuba
Povray
Luxrender