YafaRay4tS

YafaRay4tS is an add-on for Caligari's 3D content authoring environment trueSpace 7.6 that allows users to export and render their 3D projects via the photo realistic freeware render engine YafaRay.
YafaRay4tS is implemented as an XML exporter that uses batch scripting to interface with YafaRay's command line XML interface.

This has a significant advantage over direct interfacing with the render engine allowing the user to continue to work on their project while YafaRay renders the spawned request in the background.

The YafaRay4tS user interface handles all these details of interfacing with the render engine transparently for the user so that they can focus on their art and not on setting the renderer up.

However, YafaRay4tS doesn't hide the many YafaRay render settings from you, but rather makes them readily available so that you can have full control over the output produced.

Included in the YafaRay4tS distribution are several features to make using YafaRay with trueSpace easier. This ranges from the TGA_Viewer application set up to spawn after the render is complete, allowing the user to view their render and save it to a variety of file formats using the common Windows file dialog, to the Yafaray specific Light objects and YafaRay specific DirectX HLSL materials for use inside trueSpace.

Care was taken in designing the scene export to allow it to support as many of the built in trueSpace geometry types as possible, ranging from Sub-division surfaces to Morph objects. While vertex normals are not supported by YafaRay, YafaRay4tS does allow for an auto-smoothing angle to be set on a per object basis.