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 Views
Blender Retrospectives 2020 Blender Retrospective Feb 20, 2021 208267
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 Worthy of Your Note - for Animation & VFX file Jan 25, 2020 560179
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 Worthy of Your Note - for CG, Games & Viz file Jan 25, 2020 423264
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 file Jan 25, 2020 428986
Tutorials Top 15 Highest-Rated Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 file Jan 25, 2020 372956
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 for Blender 2.8 file Jan 23, 2019 341983
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 Worthy of Your Note - for CG, Games & Viz file Jan 23, 2019 680732
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 Worthy of Your Note - for Animation & VFX file Jan 23, 2019 405330
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 file Jan 23, 2019 342073
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2018: Winners Annouced file Jan 02, 2019 378768
Blender Retrospectives 2018 Blender Retrospective file Jan 02, 2019 373179
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2017 file Jan 09, 2018 965552
Blender Retrospectives 2017 Blender Retrospective file Jan 01, 2018 693804
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2017: Winners Annouced file Dec 26, 2017 547787
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials (Videos) Released in 2016 file Jan 16, 2017 762483
Blender Retrospectives 2016 Blender Retrospective file Dec 29, 2016 1057179
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2015: Seven Winners Annouced file Jan 20, 2016 787612
Blender Retrospectives 2015 Blender Retrospective file Jan 12, 2016 759290
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2015 file Jun 26, 2015 802693
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2014: Five Winners Annouced file Jan 02, 2015 810880
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2014 file Dec 11, 2014 849683
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of July 14, 2014 file Jul 14, 2014 42345
Render of the Week 'One Apple, Two Apples' by Matej Hudak - the Winner of the Week of July 6, 2014 file Jul 09, 2014 34417
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of July 7, 2014 file Jul 08, 2014 40428
Render of the Week 'Intergalactic Music Pilot' by Oleg Memukhin - the Winner of the Week of June 30, 2014 file Jun 30, 2014 35976
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of June 30, 2014 file Jun 30, 2014 32339
Render of the Week 'Pool-House-Beach' by Daniel Thul - the Winner of the Week of June 23, 2014 file Jun 23, 2014 37951
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of January 14, 2013 file Jan 14, 2013 47850
Render of the Week 'Yet Another Child of Frankenstein' by Kalinin Dmitrii - the Winner of the Week of June 14, 2014 file Jun 16, 2014 36934
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of June 23, 2014 file Jun 23, 2014 33964
Render of the Week 'Mad Dog' by Maciek Ptaszynski - the Winner of the Week of June 9, 2014 file Jun 09, 2014 39648
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of June 16, 2014 file Jun 16, 2014 34714
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of June 9, 2014 file Jun 09, 2014 32730
Render of the Week 'Painting Robots' by Gleb Alexandrov - the Winner of the Week of June 2, 2014 file Jun 02, 2014 38757
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of June 2, 2014 file Jun 02, 2014 31987
Render of the Week 'Death Taker' by Kfir Merlaub - Winner for the Week of May 26, 2014 file May 26, 2014 36638
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of May 26, 2014 file May 26, 2014 37126
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of May 19, 2014 file May 19, 2014 32589
Render of the Week 'Uncertainty' by Reynante Martinez - Winner for the Week of May 19, 2014 file May 19, 2014 38837
Blender Whiz The Artist Behind 'McLaren Studio:' Marco Cheng file May 12, 2014 29925
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of May 12, 2014 file May 12, 2014 33391