Sign In
Sign in
English

TopBanners12072302.jpg

This is a follow-up article of BI vs. Yafaray vs. Cycles - an Artist's Observation published on June 4, 2012 by Olivier Boscournu,
 the winner of the Render of the Week Award for the week of May 14, 2012. 
The following article may not reflect the official view of www.BlenderNews.org.—Editor in Chief.

July 2, 2012 8:00 AM

by Olivier Boscournu

After " Bidirectional Interior" where I did compare the 3 renderers for an indoor scene, I decided to do the same for an outdoor arch viz.

Exterior-BI-Yafaray-Cycles.jpg
Blender Internal: 12 min.
Yafaray (Photon Mapping): 18 min.
Cycles with GTX460: 9 min.

The goal is not to get the same renderings, but to observe what happen when you switch between the three methods, with as lest changes of settings as possible (only shaders & lights). The three renderings have almost the same post-compositing based on the BI passes (Blender nodes, color correction, vignetting, fog effect,...). The scene is not really complex (a simple snow ground, basic architecture, few furnitures, ...), the shaders are not sophisticated. The forest is made with a particle system and only one birch tree made with a slaping add-on. The sky lighting is obtained with an UVmapped hemisphere, used as an emit object for shader. This simple method provides good and fast results for all kinds of render engine, saving lot of time. 

Making-of-OAV12072302.jpg

Of course, BI doesn't have a Global Illumination solution, but GI is not really necessary for outdoor scene, specially in this case, and the Ambient Occlusion can be very usefull to simulate this kind of lighting with an HDR environnement. I believe, every new Blender user must learn to know how to use the Blender Internal. The method is quite old, but you get to learn a lot about how to configure the textures and lightings. It's useful for improving your technical skills. Blender Internal is pretty fast and versatile with several of rendering passes.

After BI, I've needed just a few minutes to configure the lighting method and the shaders in Yafaray. That's what I love with Yafaray, its workflow is very easy and fast, providing good results. New users can easily see that. Renderings are pretty fast that it's helpful for configuring the right settings and the border render allows fast previews on focalized areas. The rendering with Yafaray and it GI solution is 50% slower than BI on the same size (1600 x 1200 px), but it's pretty fast and requires less tweaks in lightings.

Cycles still has much room to be improved but is very efficient for outdoor--unlike for indoor arch viz. This is because it uses only a Pathtracing integrator, more suitable with opened scene and huge light source. To produce the final rendering, I had to convert each shader to make it fit for Cycles. I like the versatility and the power of its node shaders, but it's imperative to have a good CUDA graphic card with you so as to benefit from the full potential of this render engine. That's why I used my Nvidia GTX 460 (1 GB RAM & 336 CUDA cores) to get a good rendering time. With CPU it would take more than one hour!

Exterior-BI-Yafaray-Cycles-Settings.jpg

Conclusion
With a simple outdoor scene as in this case (no transparent leaves on trees, no grass,etc...), Blender users will be able to use different methods and renderers. With BI, the basic solution, you can do the job but you needs more tweaks and extra time to enhance the result. Yafaray, as external GI and biased solution, is the fastest and easiest way to get a photorealistic result on CPU! After passing a little time to know Yafaray, it's a real pleasure. As for Cycles, it's very useful with the realtime preview, and its node system provides incredible results. But in most cases, You need a good--sometimes expansive--Nvidia graphic cards.


Hardware spec.:
intel i7-2600k ( 3,4GHz), 16 Go DDRam, Nvidia GTX 460 1GoRam ( 336 cuda cores), windows7 64bits. Yafaray & BI rendering processed with 4 cores CPU, Cycles render on GPU. Made with official Blender 2.63a-64bits & official Yafaray 0.1.2 beta5a-64bits.

Related Links:
1. http://www.blendernation.com/2012/06/16/bi-vs-cycles-vs-yafray-an-artists-observation
2. http://www.olivier-boscournu.com
3. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?256953-Comparison-BI-Yafaray-Cycles-for-outdoor-archiviz
List of Articles
Subject Date Viewssort
Blender Retrospectives 2020 Blender Retrospective Feb 20, 2021 251995
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 Worthy of Your Note - for Animation & VFX file Jan 25, 2020 604556
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 Worthy of Your Note - for CG, Games & Viz file Jan 25, 2020 467617
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 file Jan 25, 2020 474235
Tutorials Top 15 Highest-Rated Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 file Jan 25, 2020 417590
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 for Blender 2.8 file Jan 23, 2019 388223
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 Worthy of Your Note - for CG, Games & Viz file Jan 23, 2019 729287
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 Worthy of Your Note - for Animation & VFX file Jan 23, 2019 451013
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 file Jan 23, 2019 386428
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2018: Winners Annouced file Jan 02, 2019 423447
Blender Retrospectives 2018 Blender Retrospective file Jan 02, 2019 417196
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2017 file Jan 09, 2018 1013049
Blender Retrospectives 2017 Blender Retrospective file Jan 01, 2018 739084
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2017: Winners Annouced file Dec 26, 2017 592796
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials (Videos) Released in 2016 file Jan 16, 2017 807477
Blender Retrospectives 2016 Blender Retrospective file Dec 29, 2016 1103188
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2015: Seven Winners Annouced file Jan 20, 2016 832251
Blender Retrospectives 2015 Blender Retrospective file Jan 12, 2016 804230
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2015 file Jun 26, 2015 847697
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2014: Five Winners Annouced file Jan 02, 2015 856215
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2014 file Dec 11, 2014 895813
Render of the Week 'Tengu' by Marcel Deneuve - the Winner of the Week of March 8, 2021 Mar 10, 2021 8030
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of March 8, 2020 Mar 10, 2021 8027
Render of the Week 'ISS-900 Lyda Interceptor' by Bert Willemsen - the Winner of the Week of October 31, 2022 Jan 01, 2023 8006
Render of the Week 'Mole Monster' by Balázs Gräff - the Winner of the Week of December 7, 2020 file Dec 09, 2020 7997
Render of the Week 'Space Trucking' by Davi Goldberg - the Winner of the Week of December 14, 2020 file Dec 16, 2020 7968
Render of the Week 'Survivor' by Andrew Sounios - the Winner of the Week of November 29, 2021 Dec 05, 2021 7936
Render of the Week 'Odin Tree' by Saif Roshdy - the Winner of the Week of November 23, 2020 file Nov 25, 2020 7928
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of March 22, 2020 Mar 24, 2021 7928
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of January 18, 2021 Jan 20, 2021 7903
Render of the Week 'Anchiornis Huxleyi' by Joanna Kobierska - the Winner of the Week of April 19, 2021 Apr 22, 2021 7899
Render of the Week 'Winter in Japan' by Sonja Christoph - the Winner of the Week of December 20, 2021 Dec 26, 2021 7888
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2022: Winners Are ... Jan 01, 2023 7887
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of July 19, 2021 Jul 25, 2021 7878
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2020: Winners Are ... Jan 13, 2021 7875
Render of the Week 'Test Run' by Sungyong Park - the Winner of the Week of August 9, 2021 Aug 14, 2021 7867
Render of the Week 'Smoking Pirate' by Nikolay Kvartnikov - the Winner of the Week of August 26, 2021 Aug 28, 2021 7867
Blender Retrospectives 2021 Blender Retrospective Jan 07, 2022 7823
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of June 21, 2021 Jun 26, 2021 7817
Render of the Week 'Castle in the Sky' by Rémi Tou - the Winner of the Week of June 7, 2020 Jun 12, 2021 7803
Render of the Week 'Suzanne’s Backside' by Mark Stoyko - the Winner of the Week of February 1, 2021 Feb 04, 2021 7776