Blender Git Commit Log

Second and final commit for this version of the yafray export code (probably, you never know
of course...)

Not quite complete, but due to lack of time as good as it will get for now.

From the previous commit, forgot to report that basic fog is supported as well. Though because I had not much time to complete the code, it is sort of unfinished, and you will have
to tweak parameters specifically for yafray again. It uses only the world horizon color, and
only uses the Blender mist distance setting.

Textures now support checker clip mode.

Fixed possibly all 'duplilist non-empty' errors, though it could hide the real cause of the
error.

AA is no longer enabled automatically for certain GI quality settings, I thought it best to
leave it to the user to decide.

SkyDome GI mode now supports cache as well. There is a new option in the GI quality menu 'Use
Blender AO settings', which will as it says use the most important AO settings for the
skydome parameters. The only AO parameters used are 'Samples', 'Dist' and the random sampling
switch, which unlike in Blender you might want to use more often, since the QMC sampling used
in yafray can result in visible patterns or a dithering type look. 'Random' is not completely
random in yafray however, it is actually jittered (stratified) sampling.
Using an occlusion cache, doesn't necessarily mean that you will always get much shorter
render times. As with 'full' GI and cache, one problem is bumpmaps, when using bump (or
normal) maps, the sampling will be much more dense, using lots more rendertime.
As a temporary fix there is a button 'NoBump', but this also has the side effect that in
areas of total indirect light (or when used with SkyDome cache) no bumpmapping will be
visible. It is therefor best used with some direct light as well.
For SkyDome with cache, and strong bumpmapping it might actually not make much difference,
since for low distance values you can usually get away with low sample values as well.

The entire material panel is now replaced by another panel to show only the parameters
important to yafray and add some new ones as well.

Since lots of users (especially yafray beginners) have had problems getting certain material
aspects right, there is now a material preset menu available to hopefully solve some of the
most common "How do I do this? It doesn't work!" questions seen in various forums.
Choosing an option from this menu will set the required parameters to default
values for yafray, and you can work your way from there to tweak it something you want.

Most buttons are copies of the same Blender parameters, with some variations. Just like
Blender 'Ray Mirror' enables reflection, 'Ray Transp' enables refraction. You can use
'ZTransp' for materials that have texture maps with alpha channels.
Again, same as Blender 'rayMir' sets the amount of reflection. Next button 'frsOfs' however
controls fresnel offset, meaning that when this is set to 1, you will get no fresnel effect
and when set to 5, reflection is totally determined by fresnel, which is important for
realistic glass/metals/etc.
IOR is self-explanatory (...), same as Blender.
When you have 'Ray Transp' enabled, the blender 'filter' button will appear next to the IOR
button. This has the same effect as in Blender.

Below that there are some new parameters, 'Ext.Color' sets the extinction color for
transparent materials. Usually, in real transparent materials, light loses some of it's
energy the further it has to travel through the object. This effect can be simulated with
this parameter. Thing to look out for is that it specifies the color which will be
REMOVED after traveling through the object. What this means is that say you have a clear
white glass sphere, and set the extinction color to a strong blue, the result will be a
very yellow object when rendered.

Next to the color sliders, there is another set of three parameters, with which you can
enable color dispersion for transparent objects. 'Pwr' sets the amount of dispersion,
the higher, the more dispersion (the more colorful the result).
(For real world materials, this number can be found or derived from data in various glass catalogues)
The 'Samples' button below that sets the number of samples used, minimum values are around
7-10, and for very strong dispersion you might need a lot more.
As usual, this also means an increase in render time of course, but to simulate
realistic materials, you shouldn't really need more than 25 samples.
In addition to that, when using low sample numbers, but to still get a good spread of colors,
you can enable the jitter button, but this will also add noise.

Point/soft(point with shadowbuffer) or sphere lights (light with radius), have a new option
to add a simple glow effect, so that lights can be made visible.
NOTE: just like spotlight halo's, glow is not visible against the background, there must be
another object behind it. Simplest solution is to use a large black shadeless plane behind
your scene.
The glow intensity can be set with the 'GlowInt' parameter (use very low values around 0.01
even lower), and you can choose from two different types with the 'GlowType' button (which
don't look much different, but type 1 is probably better, type 0 faster).

And that's it, with apologies for the still missing features and
full support in general, but this will have to do for now.