YafaRay renderer

The YafaRay renderer is very famous among Blender artists and is by far one of the best tools to work side-by-side with Blender. For a long time, we had a direct link from the Blender user interface to render scenes and projects with YafaRay. In the past few months, the renderer suffered a complete rewrite, and a huge upgrade was made in order to make YafaRay even better and to add more features such as different render methods and capabilities. As YafaRay is open source software, just like Blender, we can download and install it free of cost on any computer, with versions available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

To download the latest version of YafaRay, just visit the official YafaRay website at http://www.yafaray.org, and look for a version compatible with your operational system. For this project, we will be using version 0.1.1, which is the most updated version available at the time of writing.

In order to use YafaRay, we have to install Python because all of the integration from Blender 3D to YafaRay is made by an exporter script that converts all of the Blender scenes to a format readable by YafaRay. All scripts in Blender use a language called Python, and if Python is not installed, the exporter won't work. To download Python, visit http://www.python.org. For Blender 2.49, we have to use Python 2.6.X.

Installing YafaRay

When both Python and YafaRay installers are downloaded, we can begin installing them. Install Python before YafaRay and choose all of the default options. The next step is to install YafaRay; just choose the default options and it will be installed. To check if the renderer is correctly installed, open Blender 3D and you will find the export option in the Render menu of the scripts window.

This is a script placed automatically by the YafaRay installer and should appear after the installation process. If the option doesn't appear, something happened during the installation process making the exporter unavailable.

The first problem may be that a previous version of YafaRay is already be installed on your machine before an update. To avoid problems, it's recommended that you uninstall the previous versions of YafaRay and manually erase any versions of the exporter script in the Blender scripts folder.

Another problem is that you might encounter is an error message when the exporter script is called.

This occurs when Python is not installed when the YafaRay export script is executed. To fix this error, try to install Python again.