Wings 3D/User Manual/YafRay

YafRay is an external ray-trace renderer you can download from;

http://www.yafray.org

There is an article about Wings/YafRay integration on the YafRay wiki which you can access here:

http://wiki.yafray.org/bin/view.pl/UserDoc/Wings3DMihnea

Follow the directions to install it to your hard drive. Once installed you will need to add its location to your path. The path is a list of locations that will be searched for software.

WINDOWS

In windows 98 you edit your autoexec.bat. in it you will see a line that reads something like Path=C:\; C:\windows; C:\windows\system; etc… At the end of this list of locations add a semicolon, a space and c:\yafray

When you restart your machine it will be added to the paths.

Windows 2000/Windows XP uses the same convention but in a different place. you right click on My Computer Click the advanced tab. Then click on the variables button. Here you will find two windows with various settings. Look in the lower one labeled System Variables. You should see a variable named path. Double-click it and it will open a property panel to change it. Add ; C:\yafray to the end of the list of paths (only use one ; between each path) If no Path variable is there add it by clicking the New button under system Variables.

Variable Name is Path Value is C:\yafray . A YafRay plug-in comes with Wings3D, when Wings3D starts the plug-in looks to see if the YafRay software is installed. If Wings3D can find YafRay in the path then it will add it as a render choice as shown in the image above.

Also, if Wings3D finds YafRay as noted above, you can go to the Wings Edit menu -> Plug-in Preferences and YafRay will appear as an option.

Selecting the YafRay Plug-in Preferences menu results in the following dialogue box:

Dialogue dropdown list: later

Executable: This should be where YafRay is installed on your system. If it is not correct, use the Browse button to navigate to it's actual location.

Options: This is where you can enter additional command line options for Wings3D to feed the YafRay command line renderer. They are as follows:

       -s Render using the specified strategy.  Valid values are
               "threaded": Multi-threaded (default)
               "mono": Single process
               "fork": Multi-process

       -c N    Number of threads/processes to use
       -z      Use Net optimized

       -p PATH YafRay's installation path

       -r min_x:max_x:min_y:max_y      Render region, values between -1 and 1
                                       whole image is -r -1:1:-1:1

       -v      YafRay Version

In the above image you can see the -c option is set to the value of 2 This will cause the YafRay renderer to use both processors of a dual CPU system or both "sides" of an Intel HyperThreaded (HT) processor.

Be warned, however. Do NOT use this option unless you want to surrender any further use of the computer while it's rendering. Using this option will peg both processes to 100% CPU utilization while rendering, so forget about doing anything else while rendering. It's useful for speeding up quick previews, or for speeding up those long "set it & forget it" renders, but if you want to get caught up on your e-mail or surf the 'net while rendering, stick with the default setting (put nothing in the "Options" field or the YafRay Options dialogue box).

The -p, and -r options are set by Wings3D's YafRay render dialogue.