Yaf(a)Ray 0.1.0

Yaf(a)Ray 0.1.0 is a new raytracing render engine written from scratch, and it replaces YafRay 0.0.9. After two years of development, Yaf(a)ray already features a complete set of rendering options and shaders. Yaf(a)Ray can be used with official releases of Blender 3D. Help us to improve it! You can download Yaf(a)Ray 0.1.0 in the downloads section

2nd. Annual YafRay Contest: The lost bytes

The Lost Bytes

Where do the lost bytes go when your hard disk definitely crashes or when you format it? and when a file is erased? The render should depict a heaven for bytes where they can have a better life once they die in this world. One could also image a bytes hell or even the well known bytes bucket. Imagine, what happens to the evil bytes?

Some rules:

• Only Yaf(a)ray can be used for rendering passes.
• The contest will end the 1th of July 2008, 0:00 GMT.
• You can, of course, post process and composite your render with photographs, etc, but using only Yaf(a)ray passes.
• Post your final renders in this thread please.
• Render minimum resolution must be 600 x 800 portrait or 800 x 600 landscape
• Work in progress threads are not compulsory, but if you post a link to your WIP thread along your final render, you are eligible for this category prize. WIP threads can be in any forum you want (Cgtalk, Blenderartists, yafray.org, etc.)

Gallery Update!

UPDATE Febrary 24 2008 More pics!!

After months without any updates, we have just uploaded some of the best 2007 YafRay renders to the gallery. Enjoy!

Grand YafRay Challenge #1: Depot

Samo just started a new forum section called: "Contests, Challenges and Other Activities". That section will host contests and other activities to encourage YafRay usage and to learn more things about lighting & rendering.

Moderators will launch new contest and activities, but you can also propose a new contest or activity, although in this case we would like some previous discussion in Your input here! thread to assure the quality of the proposed event.

The goal of the first challenge is texturing and lighting the Blender scene provided. The real photo is only a reference, you can try to reproduce that lighting & reflections scheme, or you can follow your own path.

You can read full challenge information here:

Grand YafRay Challenge #1: Depot

Javier Galan YafRay works

We want to thank to Javier Galán (a.k.a. Chronoh) for this work with YafRay site writing this quick review about his latest demo reel, which you can visit at www.efedoce.com. Some of his reel works are rendered with YafRay. Enjoy!

3D world Magazine supports YafRay

3D World the magazine for 3D artists has donated one-year subscription as prize for YafRay Fifth Anniversary Contest (See new below). They also told us that there is a big Blender character animation tutorial coming up in issue 94, on sale 17 July. Thank you very much!

YafRay Fifth Anniversary - Contest (New Prize!)

In July 2002, a computer science student called Jandro started to code an open source raytracer called YafRay. Or maybe it was in July the first YafRay release and in fact coding started a bit earlier, while he was preparing his last semester's exams. The only things that we know for sure are that a) he was bored indeed :) and b) he was looking for an open source raytracer and found nothing.

This July will be the 5th Anniversary of YafRay. We want you to make a commemorative render for this anniversary.

Some rules:

• The render motif should be related to this anniversary in some way.
• You can use either YafRay or Yaf(a)ray for rendering.
• The contest will end the 10th of July.
• You can, of course, post process and composite your render, but using only YafRay/Yaf(a)ray passes.
• Post your final renders in -> this thread please <-.

The Winner will be selected by YafRay.org forum members. The winner can choose between:

• One item from the Blender Shop, up to your choice, donated by the YafRay Team.
• Or one-year subscription for 3D World, the magazine for 3D artist. 3D World has donated this prize. Many thanks to them.

The prize left will be awarded to the contestant classified in second place.

Thank you in advance for participating.

Alvaro Luna (Samo)

YafRay animation film released: The goat, the boy and the sun

From BlenderNation:

Martin White the nominee of the 2005 Suzanne Award for the Best Animation Artwork has completed his 20min film entitled: The Goat, The Boy And The Sun.

Martin has been inspired to make 3d animated films since seeing the animated film Tron as very small child. Today with tools available pretty cheap for the masses, Mr. White finally had the chance to make something out of his life.

In 1999, a blinding light illuminated White’s face, as he for the first time heard the classical piece by Prokofiev: “Scythian Suite” conducted by Kurt Masur on a BBC. That taken with his love for Disney’s Fantasia, inspired him to take the entirety of Mr. Prokofiev’s music piece and create an animated short.

After seeing the stunning images created by the Blender and Yafray community, he decided to take the open source route. And not long ago after many years of hard work he presented his 3rd animated film at Blender Artists Forums for everyone to see!

See full note here or visit The goat, the boy and the sun site

YafRay 0.0.9 Released!

Blender 2.42 is out and YafRay needed to be updated for working with it.

So we have new YafRay release, about a year later of 0.0.8 version. In fact, this is a maintenance release with few (but important) changes. Greatest change is the project manager ;-) because Mathias Wein, a.k.a. Lynx, is at the head of YafRay development. Good luck, Lynx and thank you for getting involved in this insane project!

Here is a 0.0.9 changelog:

• New SAH-kdtree for mesh objects, which is hopefully mature now. Improvements include:



• Smaller memory footprint
• More robust traversal, so holes in meshes should be history
• Faster ray-scene-intersection (depending on scene) due to new building algorithm (surface area heuristic and triangle clipping, preparing scene can take a bit longer though)



• Image loading code is more careful when trying to load files with unknown extension (crash-fixes)
• Added -p command line option for Linux to specify an alternative plugin path when rendering XML (yafray executable), YafRay also prints used plugin path and number of plugins loaded to console now.
• Changing number of threads with blender plugin now takes effect without restarting blender (blender 2.42 and later only)
• Fixed some minor bugs, code cleanups/updates for newer compilers and build-environments

You can download packages from our download section.

New gallery update

Thanks to Claws collaboration, we have added new and impressive images to the gallery.

Thank to all image authors for their work. If you have a render which could be part of our gallery, just send an e-mail to Chronoh or me (Luis). You also can post it in our forums, giving permission to us for upload it to our gallery.

Enjoy!!

YafRay's Gallery

Yafray 0.0.8 release notes

We have elaborated some notes about YafRay 0.0.8 release, mainly based on eeshlo's commit logs:

YafRay's Wiki Release Notes 0.0.8

These notes are a quick overview of YafRay 'new' capabilities. Besides, in them we are also trying to explain how Blender parameters are translated into YafRay XML files, and which ones are the YafRay features that can be only accessed by XML editing.

We hope you like them.

Claus Andersen and Alvaro Luna

PS: We've opened a discussion thread in YafRay forums specific about XML tuning:

YafRay XML Tuning Workshop

Blender 3D Model Repository — Yafray

We have detected that people who gets started on YafRay for the first time has certain difficulties to find out good configurations. We though that it would be good if YafRay had a bunch of examples to play with and to learn from, available for downloading. In the old YafRay docs there were many examples, although they have been lost or they are not longer compatible with the newer YafRay Realeases.

We have gathered some scenes from tutorials and forums and a few finished scenes from their makers. However, we wish we had more scenes, particularly finished ones, examples about a particular YafRay feature, cornell boxes, little used settings, etc.

Besides, we are interested in XML tunning in order to access those YafRay features no currently available through the Blender exporter (conetrace,SSS, etc). In those cases would be interesting to include both the Blender source file and the edited XML scene with a brief explanation inside about the code added, using the comment tags:

< !-- Example the comment tag in a YafRay XML file -- >

The files are hosted in [Blender Model Repository]. To contribute your YafRay scenes to this archive please use the upload form provided at the bottom of that page. If you want your Yafray work to be categorised into YafRay section, please give the file a descriptive name, for instance: yafray_house. zip

Alvaro Luna - Administrator of the Blender Model Repository.