YafaRay rendering plug-in

[UbuntuBirdy]

@Emmanuel - My pictures are absolutely no criticism to the plugin! In fact I'm happy to have it, even it does not work as expected. But it tells me SH3D is evolving and this is great!
I had to present PVR pictures to show the missing ambient on the YafaRay rendering. I only want to show how it turns out on my system and perhaps to help you (or enko) to find bugs or missing or wrong settings or what else it can be.
I'm so thankful for your work and I have a big smile in my face because you released this plugin, even if my trailer now has to proof its winter abilities...

[hansmex]

@Emmanuel

Following your suggestion, I drew a simple room, with textured floor and walls, and two human figures.
As before, SH3D crashed a few seconds after starting YafaRay.

H

[Ceciliabr]

Code: Select all

I fixed the issue encountered by Cecilia (just a missing DLLs for older macOS versions)

Thank you! It works now.

From my tests, this new rendering engine runs twice faster.

I created a this project from scratch - a small construct with no panel lights, only 40 Mb.
A comparative test (for speed check):



The bottom line is that Sunflow performs a lot faster.

I also recorded a short screen movie to show the difference.
http://ceciliabr.com/sh3d/YafaTest.mov

In the video, you can see that YafaRay is using 17 seconds to prepare the rendering process, as the default renderer is using only 9 seconds. With a larger file ( 1.4 GB) it was still preparing when I stopped it after 5 minutes.

I know we are on beta-level, and that there's still lots of work to be done – and from looking at the quality renders in the YafaRay gallery, I think YafaRay can be a very good alternative [:)]


Cec

[ndorigatti]

...

About images posted by UbuntuBirdy and ndorigatti, I'm happy you succeeded to run the plug-in but comparing your results with the ones generated with enkonyito plug-in isn't really fair, since I just tried to adjust YafaRay settings to reproduce images generated by the default Photo creation tool of Sweet Home 3D! But surely, even on that side, there must be some remaining bugs.
...

Please let me remark that mine was not a complain or criticism, I know how much work has been done to just make YafaRay render, so I really respect the work!
I was just showing a comparation of the lights, because I think YafaRay does something way better than sunflow (PVR or not, in general), but that (probably) with some effort like the one enkonyito put on to sunflow yafaray can perform at top levels!

It takes time, effort, test and feedback to reach that level but I think it can be reached! Although it's released and works, it is stil a beta so bugs and issues are normal, and we are here to help!
I'll try changing my scenes and using different lightning to check if I can have perfect renderings!

In the meantime, congratulations for the reached goal, and thank you!

[GnU]

I can make the photo if I choose the first and the seconds levels of quality but if I choose the third or the fouth the program shut down without showing any error.

[Puybaret]

@UbuntuBirdy and ndorigatti, thanks for your encouraging comments. My previous comment was also written to avoid confusion for users not aware of PVR plug-in. So no problem. There’s a little ambient occlusion in virtual visit mode when a texture is used for the sky, like with SunFlow rendering in default creation tool. Otherwise everything in the sun shade would be too dark.
My first goal is to try to reproduce current SunFlow renderings with YafaRay (possibly without the defects , then we’ll see how the settings of both rendering engines should evolve after all these years.

@Cec, YafaRay engine is slower than SunFlow during preparation process because it requires to copy texture images in separate files whereas I had modified SunFlow to make it able to load images directly from ZIP files (like SH3D, SH3T or SH3F files) without copying them in temporary files. Therefore, the more textures you have and the larger images you use, the more time it will take to copy them during the preparation. You should rather see a speed gain when you render larger images.
By the way, thanks for the video, but unfortunately running both rendering engines at the same time can’t be used to compare their performances because they try to use all the available cores / threads of the computer, and it’s not possible to give them the an equal slice of CPU power.

@Hans, thanks again for your tests. I hope I’ll be able to find soon a solution at least under Windows.

@GnU, the two lowest quality levels work exactly as in the default photo creation tool, i.e. they use OpenGL and fortunately still work.

[enkonyito]

In the last few months, I have been working on implementing the maximum functionality of Sunflow in Sweet Home 3D before it is considered obsolete.
According to Yafaray's documentation, it seems this rendering engine has nothing to envy Sunflow. It will take some time to tame it but the first step would be to establish a basic configuration for general use equivalent to Sunflow.

To Windows users, could you check if the program fails even with an empty home or some available from the File > New from demo menu item? Thanks

Tests of version 1.0beta2.
- Quality 3 or 4:
After clicking Create, the waiting image spins a few seconds and then SH3D closes automatically for an empty file (not systematic).
The rendering runs correctly for demo files or saved projects like those in the gallery.

Yafaray quality 3 is faster than Sunflow while Yafaray quality 4 is a bit slower than Sunflow.

Demo_1BedroomAppartment


Enko

[hansmex]

Under Windows
After reading Enko's message, I tried two homes from the gallery. In both cases the program stops after a little thingy spins for a few seconds.

Under Ubuntu
I did some speed tests with example home #7 from the Gallery.
For all pictures: size 1200x900 pixels

YafaRay - Q3 - approx 2-3 minutes
YafaRay - Q4 - approx 13-14 minutes

SH3D Sunflow - Q3 - approx 4 minutes
SH3D Sunflow - Q4 - aborted after 35 minutes

SH3D Sunflow is the original implementation, not one of Enko's plug-ins.
For some reason I forgot to save the rendered images, so I cant offer quality comparisons.

Hans

[Ceciliabr]

I have done some more testing on YafaRay today.
On some projects it really outperforms Sunflow when it comes to render time, on other projects it's way behind.
It's a bit like going back to the stone-age with the non-resizable render window, especially since YafaRay treats light very differently from Sunflow, and I had to do a lot of quick Q3 renderings to get the light right. And, as Puybaret points out:

YafaRay engine is slower than SunFlow during preparation process because it requires to copy texture images in separate files whereas I had modified SunFlow to make it able to load images directly from ZIP files (like SH3D, SH3T or SH3F files) without copying them in temporary files.

That's one reason why YafaRay performs slower on most of my test projects.

running both rendering engines at the same time can’t be used to compare their performances

Well,I don't quite buy that argument, looking at the head start I was giving YafaRay.
Anyway, I have made a new video, en suite, with a stop watch and a CPU-monitor running:

YafaRay-Test-2

Maybe this can be the reason why YafaRay is slower than Sunflow?



YafaRay is not using more than 32% of my CPU capacity, whereas Sunflow is using 98%.

Just out of curiosity: Why go for another CPU-renderer and not a CPU/GPU-renderer?


Cec

[Mike53]

Thought i would give this a try.

Ver. 1.6, set to gloss, all other settings default



and with Yafaray



3 x it crashed when it started the render, 1 it crashed when it completed the render but before it could be saved.
Windows 7 64 bit