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You can call me "Ray"
About Truespace Archives
These pages are a copy of the official truespace forums prior to their removal somewhere around 2011.
They are retained here for archive purposes only.
You can call me "Ray" // New Users
Post by Musikman // Apr 21, 2009, 12:57pm
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Musikman
Total Posts: 88
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Silly newbie curious question.....would anyone be kind enough to briefly explain V-Ray (and Yafaray). I read alot of posts that mention it in passing here, but never really knew what everyone was talking about. Thanks!:D
Paul |
Post by frootee // Apr 21, 2009, 1:05pm
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frootee
Total Posts: 2667
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Hi Musikman.
VRay and Yafaray are offline renderers. Lightworks and VirtuaLight are offline renderers on the Model side.
Offline rendering is the traditional method of creating high quality images
from your modelling, lighting, texturing, and scene composition. |
Post by Musikman // Apr 21, 2009, 1:21pm
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Musikman
Total Posts: 88
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Hey Frootee
Thanks for the info.:) Are these freeware programs, and if so, are there links available on this forum so I can check them out? Thanks! |
Post by frootee // Apr 21, 2009, 1:54pm
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frootee
Total Posts: 2667
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Hey Musikman. You're welcome!
Vray for truespace is no longer for sale.
yafaray: Jack Edwards and a team are working on an interface for yafaray, used in truespace. This thread also includes links to yafaray.org to download yafaray:
http://forums1.caligari.com/truespace/showthread.php?t=7782
Lightworks and Virtualight come with truespace, on the Model side.
There is also the Workspace real time renderer. |
Post by TomG // Apr 22, 2009, 1:37am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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Yep, these are all render engines - they take the definition of the scene that specifies what objects are where, what their surface is like, what light sources are where, and from where you are viewing the scene, and turn that information into a 2D image by calculating what you can see and what that looks like.
Real-time render engines do the same thing, but in real-time - to do this they remove ray tracing, which is what an offline engine like those listed here does. Ray tracing fires rays from the camera to see what objects those rays hit, and works out the lighting at those points. This allows rays to bounce so you can get things like reflections, or to bend so you get refraction through glass and similar materials.
The engines also use other ways of calculating light transport in the scene, eg Global Illumination, which is an even more involved process that calculates how light bounces from one surface to another.
Raytracing and things like GI are currently too computationally expensive to do in real-time (they take so long to calculate that a real-time display couldn't update smoothly if it calculated it).
HTH!
Tom |
Post by Musikman // Apr 22, 2009, 5:43am
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Musikman
Total Posts: 88
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Hi Tom
Thanks for the info. My next question would be, is this something that will be necessary for rendering my future animation videos? Is something available now, & should I download it, or wait until Jack has completed the yafaray project that Frootee spoke of?
A little confused....the link Frootee posted took me to a discussion about a yafaray project in development stage. I assume if I go to yafaray.org there is a version available, so maybe Jack is working on upgrading it? Thanks!
Paul |
Post by jrboddie // Apr 22, 2009, 6:06am
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jrboddie
Total Posts: 91
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IMHO, unless your animation is for presenting architectural details to a client or is full of glass and mirrors, you should use the real-time renderer.
It is much faster and you can spend your time on scene composition, story and models/characters instead of fiddling with obscure parameters for GI, caustics and photons!
I bet that Wall-E would have been just as successful if rendered using a RT renderer. The magic is in the story--not in photo realism. |
Post by TomG // Apr 22, 2009, 6:15am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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You'd only need yafaray if you were looking to do Global Illumination and Caustics, which are high end 3D techniques. They are not required in most animations. If you have glass, mirrors, want ultra realistic lighting, then perhaps - but chances are it is not what you need.
So, if you want reflections etc then you can use the built in, already provided render engines Lightworks and Virtualight (the second will actually do Global Illumination and Caustics, just its a bit tricky to use). Lightworks with HDRI will give good realism if you want that. Lightworks with just regular lighting will give great results too.
If you are just after simple animation, then the real-time renderer may be all you need.
Since you are just starting out in 3D, it is unlikely you'll have the need for what yafaray adds to tS, so I would just focus on learning the real-time renderer and the Lightworks renderer for now. Great places to get the concepts, and produce great results.
HTH!
Tom |
Post by Jack Edwards // Apr 23, 2009, 10:31am
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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YafaRay is developed by the YafaRay Team, I'm just writing an exporter that integrates YafaRay into trueSpace and am not affiliated with them in any way.
The current version of the exporter v0.6.0 is functional. An update to the exporter (YafaRay4tS) is coming soon as I finish the website and make some minor changes to the code and changes to lights. |
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