Well guys, lots of comments here thanks, I ended up using Blender Internal for rendering, I wanted something fast for render on Architecture (older computer cpu only), seems using BI + AO is the best solution, or I have to use something like UnrealEngine 4 for even faster visualization.
Is there any opensource or free realtime engine that is PBR (Physical Based Rendering and Shading) for this purposes?
One thing they also do is release obscure “nightly” or whatever builds to make it look like they are developing the program, but they leave it unstable for purpose. This can go on almost forever. I’ve been waiting for next actual Windows release of Code::Blocks for four years or how long it has been? Code::Blocks is almost as good as Visual Studio Express, so it’s clearly a threat for commercial agents.
Thanks. YafaRay is indeed a very nice and capable render engine. I believe it has to do with the fact that its main developers (Jandro, Mathias, Rodrigo etc) are very capable people. YafaRay has been always developed as an independent project because we wanted to in the first place and we have never asked or been given any preference over other external engines like the ones mentioned in this thread, despited the fact that its prececesor YafRay was integrated in oficial releases and provided very needed raytracing capabilities to this community for the first time.
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’).
False. There is not any “owner” as you say in our project. We have only the responsability to keep it running the best we can. We don’t have any policy in place that forbids anything of what you say, but more importantly we don’t have any substantial income to pay for developers. If you want to hire a developer to work on YafaRay or its exporters you are welcome to do so, in fact we encourage this every time we get in contact with other software projects interested in YafaRay for rendering. Moreover, we don’t have any kind of feedback or collaboration from commercial applications that use YafaRay for rendering and they don’t even honor the terms of our LGPL license.
Also please don’t use Blender metrics to measure other FOSS projects success. If you want builds or documentation up to date then you must collaborate. We asume that there is not enough generosity in the whole world to keep some FOSS users satisfied, mainly the ones that never give anything in return. Anyway the YafaRay project has been running for 13 years and I still expect some success for it in the future.
I thought you were the developers? What are you doing then?
Thanks. YafaRay is indeed a very nice and capable render engine. I believe it has to do with the fact that its main developers (Jandro, Mathias, Rodrigo etc) are very capable people. YafaRay has been always developed as an independent project because we wanted to in the first place and we have never asked or been given any preference over other external engines like the ones mentioned in this thread, despited the fact that its prececesor YafRay was integrated in oficial releases and provided very needed raytracing capabilities to this community for the first time.
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’).
False. There is not any “owner” as you say in our project. We have only the responsability to keep it running the best we can. We don’t have any policy in place that forbids anything of what you say, but more importantly we don’t have any substantial income to pay for developers. If you want to hire a developer to work on YafaRay or its exporters you are welcome to do so, in fact we encourage this every time we get in contact with other software projects interested in YafaRay for rendering. We don’t have any kind of feedback or collaboration from commercial applications that use YafaRay for rendering and they don’t honor the terms of our LGPL license.
Also please don’t use Blender metrics to measure other FOSS projects success. If you want builds or documentation up to date then you must collaborate. We asume that there is not enough generosity in the whole world to keep some FOSS users satisfied, mainly the ones that never gave anything in return.
you don’t need to be a developer to write user docs or to make builds.
Thank you @Alvaro, I believe there are a lot of people wants something like Yafaray to be used in their projects, and be improved, I see povray addon still exist on blender while from my view if it was Yafaray was much better, at least more viewers and people may help the project better this way, I think Yafaray maintainer should talk to Ton for at least being part of Blender’s addon, I do not think something like Yafaray should die soon.
So does that extrapolate to an idea that there’s also no ‘project lead’ in the Yafaray project? I would imagine it would only make it more difficult to hammer out an overall vision along with a roadmap so people know what the plans are in terms of new features, functionality, and optimizations. I always thought you were the owner by default because you’re the main promoter of the project, the person who started the project, and the person who built the website.
Also, if it’s true that commercial companies are conspiring against the Yafaray project, have you considered making a case against them in court, what about contacting the FSF itself and have them do the legal work? For one thing, the money you might get in damages may actually be enough to put one of the developers on a paid contract.
This is concerning (my bold):
There are organizations that can help in the event of a license violation (FSF, Software Freedom Law Center, Software Freedom Conservancy [though I think the last one requires your project to be a member]). I’m assuming that you’ve reached out to at least one of them. What did they say?
I have several responsabilities in the project but there is not ‘owner’ per se, in any case the community that uses it is the real owner of the software. I am not the site administrator for instance and I am not a developer. We welcome any kind of paid development on YafaRay made by third parties using YafaRay for commercial purposes, which is a standard development model for many other FOSS projects.
Despite the fact that we don’t have any project leader many of us have a very clear vision about what should be improved in YafaRay. We would like to apply to GSoC again, unfortunatelly GSoC application proccess does not favour small projects like YafaRay that have infraestructure to get just one idea implemented.
There are organizations that can help in the event of a license violation (FSF, Software Freedom Law Center, Software Freedom Conservancy [though I think the last one requires your project to be a member]). I’m assuming that you’ve reached out to at least one of them. What did they say?
We are members of Software in the Public Interest Inc. already and I suppose they have some kind of lawyer at hand for legal services. At the moment we have not started any proceedings. In one case the company has donated substantially for a code sprint though we are not sure whether they fully respect the LGPL license. The other case is far worse, they don’t respect the LGPL license at all and they have not contacted us or never collaborated with us at all. In this case it is probably that we will do something about it.
but it lacked at ability to make complex materials
YafaRay can do complex materials through the blend material.
I think that the lack of passess is the only thing that I really miss in Yaf(a)ray; yes, I know you can tweak your scene so that you’ll get something like a reflection pass or pure diffuse but it’s a rather hack than real solution (needless to say it requires another render for every single pass).
Beside that it’s a really nice engine. And in terms of light I believe it creates better results than Cycles (and that’s my own opinion).
What are you then?
In one case the company has donated substantially for a code sprint though we are not sure whether they fully respect the LGPL license.
How do you violate LGPL in case of a renderer? They somehow statically link a yafaray library in some other program?
Thanks, light energy management in YafaRay is particularly good. With a good lighting workflow you can achieve very balanced and coherent material radiances and gradients and the linear workflow is very well executed as well.
What are you then?
How do you violate LGPL in case of a renderer? They somehow statically link a yafaray library in some other program?
I don’t know for sure. I just find unethical that they use YafaRay commercially without giving anything back, but the LGPL license has got some provisions that allow for this kind of situation.
I don’t know exactly what that means, but certainly you can create art with Yafaray and use it in commercial projects? Unless I’ve been totally wrong all these years. What I understand LGPL means that you can’t use part of the source code/libraries in projects that are not GPL as well. (Unless you dynamically link a library in case of LGPL.)
Unless you have evidence that they added functionalities to yafaray and released the binary without releasing the modified/added code, they are perfectly within the legal requirements of LGPL.
Please, everyone can see the difference. I do commercial work with YafaRay almost every day. The case described here is only a pretty exaple of why LGPL licenses are discouraged nowadays, but on the other hand it means that YafaRay, disguished as someone’s else work, reachs to many more people, which is the original motto of the program. So we are not that unhappy about it.
Thanks for digging into the project again! Much needed and my simple test are working like a charm, and really fast! Thanks again!
So how fast is it?
Faster than BI, and has a few GI solutions like path tracing, photon mapping, bidirectional path tracing and SPPM. Renders are really clean and with adaptive sampling, you don’t have to rely on brute force AA to clean up a scene.
But its not ready yet, right?