Why Yafaray is not one of the offical renderer in blender?

Just wonder,
today I was testing Yafaray and it seems very good renderer, fast and has different method, I see SPPM is fast, and other stuff like more accurate transcelucy, I like, I wish it was one of the offical blender renderer, or somehow combining Blender internal render with Yafaray.

Is related to license? or amount of work that developer can’t do in time (yafaray devs)?:confused:

Slow development.
And why it needs to be official anyway?

probably, yes it is slow development,
I think being offical may helop the Yafaray to be better, also blender internal seems fading away, having a renderer like yafaray which is small in size is not bad I think, may some expert expain details,
sad to see some good free renderer there and lots of effort was done and rarely used in production. everyone wants to build their own render system, and I think puting efforts to 1 or 2 renderer is better than lots of free renderer that goes nowhere.

YafaRay is an abandoned project.

It´s predecessor, Yafray, was indeed once integrated into Blender. It was deemed to much work to keep it integrated, so it was trashed. Cycles was built from the ground with better integration in mind. These things are never as easy as just integrating an external renderer. There you go.

hmm, good to know,

Is there any alternative to yafaray free and fast one for slower hardwares, despite Cycles for architecure visualization (animated rendering)?

if your hardware is slow your renders are slow no matter the render engine. Even if the engine is well optimised you will probably be unhappy with the speed if you only have a dual core processor.

There are:

Nox
http://www.evermotion.org/nox

Appleseed

And Mitsuba
http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/devblog/

All three have plugins for Blender as far as I know. Unsure how up to date Appleseed is with blender though. I love mitsuba but it’s hard to work with in a production pipeline right now. Also you will need to search the forums in the code section for the addons regarding Appleseed and Mitsuba.

As far as I can determine YafaRay is alive and well albeit the development is slow due to the number of developers. As a matter of fact it was just updated to work in 2.72 and I assume beyond. http://www.yafaray.org/download#yafaray015

I find it a nice little renderer for archviz that is going to be animated. (Direct Ltg.,Caustics, AO) But, it has nowhere near the versatility of Blender Internal nor Cycles. And, while that makes it a pleasure to setup sometimes you are left searching for workarounds.

From what I can tell, a contributing factor to Yafaray’s rather slow development is the fact that the owner of the engine has a strict policy that forbids development work as a paid contract. Yafaray could be seen as FOSS in its purest form, but the problem is that it makes it very difficult for it to really take off as an application (imagine the sheer amount of functionality that would not be in Blender if the policy was ‘volunteer work only’).

I have also noticed that many webpages have not been updated in years, this can give the illusion of Yafaray being a dead project (which is not a good impression to give on someone who is visiting the website for the first time).

Rendering is not the area where you want to have a “no paid work” policy. It’s such a niche field that if you’re good enough at it to make anything worth using, you’re likely worth a lot of money to someone.

It being under the LGPL (if I remember correctly), the “owners” views are only opinions but do not legally prevent anyone from doing paid work on the Yafaray source code and releasing that work in accordance with the LGPL. In fact, the GPL (and with it its sibling, the LGPL) was crafted exactly with the purpose that the original author of the software should not put arbitrary restrictions on what the user can do with it.

Then why is there a page on their website from GSoC 2010. Those students (if it ever happened) would be getting paid to contribute to the development of Yafaray. If volunteer only why their different view a few years previously

Shylon we have no idea what your processor is since YafaRay renders using the CPU. As a reference I have a AMD FX 6100 Six-Core and I can’t animate using YafaRay except using Direct Light, Caustics and AO. Which gives you a very different look then BI using Direct Lighting and AO by the way. In other words for any animation attempt I had to forget Global Illumination. Throw some glass and gloss in your picture then check Direct Lighting, Caustics and AO. You might be surprised. Especially if you have a slow processor.

Ace, Ace, Ace, I don’t think YafaRay was started ‘To take off’. Surely not in the sense that Cycles was. And, granted that is nothing but an opinion. Damn I wish one of the developers would see this thread and respond. Since I could be wrong to the ninth degree. But, you have to admit it is a pretty versatile little render engine even with the limitations. And, a free alternative to a raytracer. A niche render engine if you will given the number of developers left. And, one many of us are glad is out here.

You are absolutely right about the website through. I guess many in the core group have moved on is the reason for that. After all they never had any backing from the Blender Institute that I’m aware of except the integration into Blender. Let me say again; ‘…that I’m aware of…’

I thought the owner himself said at one point about concerns that it would lead to developers choosing not to contribute unless they receive money from users. I also don’t recall him actively seeking to rejoin the GSoC program since Google turned them down the following year.

I am a man of few words. I like more the facts… https://github.com/TheBounty/Core/network

Indeed, it did happen and they did get paid. The result was SPPM, Photon Mapping Irradiance Caching and SSS. The SSS has since been further developed by povmaniaco.

The stated reason for joining GSOC was simply to attract developers, and the stated reason it was not pursued in later years was that the developers showed little interest in staying after GSOC finished.

I think Yafaray was promising ten years ago, but nothing has happened since then. It’s a mystery what always happens to these promising open source projects. If I was a believer of conspiracy theories I would say commercial agents pay open source developers to slow down the development, because you don’t want to have free competition just as good (or better) than commercial software. It’s just not possible to develop something that slow as Yafaray, you have to try hard. If the renderer is extremely advanced it’s not that big threat in commecial scene and “they” allow faster development as in case of LuxRender. It’s too scientific and takes too much resources to be a serious competition for bigger commercial players.

At the moment Cycles is doing pretty much everything Yafaray with better intergration of course. There is no reason even to try to integrate Yafaray to Blender more closely.

I really liked Yafaray for its simplicity
but it lacked at ability to make complex materials
but for architecture and product renderings that was not a problem

Yafaray also has direct light photon and path tracer which is a nice set
however Cycles has only a path tracer but you can get the fast direct light effect
by turning all bounces down to the minimum.

The thing I really liked about Yafaray was the AA engine and noise control!

I haven’t been keeping up with Blender development, but surely there should be no need to try. Is the Blender API not fully complete and available to all external renderers?

The render API is incomplete and tough to work with if you want to do anything more than simple export/load to image buffer.