Different Renderer Tests

Hello, I figured it was time for a new post by me. I've recently been messing around with some different renderers, including Yaf(a)ray, Luxrender, and Indigo. Both Luxrender and Indigo are physically accurate, unbiased renderers, which means that they render a very noisy picture, and remove the noise until told to stop by the user. This means that they both take a very long time to render, if you want good results. Yaf(a)ray is a biased renderer, which means that it's faster, but it also requires more tweaking to get right. All of these renderers have their pros and cons, some of which I will explain here.

Yaf(a)ray:

• More realistic than Blender Internal
• Includes caustics and global illumination
• Reasonably fast, because it's a biased renderer
• Many Blender material settings don't work with it
• Caustics are difficult to get right (I haven't managed to yet)

Example rendered in Yaf(a)ray in 5:18

Luxrender:

• More realistic than YafaRay
• Very little set up required
• Tools for changing picture while rendering
• Render can be stopped and then started again later
• Physically accurate, no setting up caustics/global illumination
• Very slow, takes a long time to remove noise, this is because it's an unbiased renderer

Example rendered in Luxrender in 42:56

Indigo:

• Physically accurate
• More realistic than YafaRay
• Very little set up required, other than materials
• Very slow, because it's an unbiased renderer
• No integrated post processing tools, unlike Luxrender

Example rendered in Indigo in 22:13