About Yafaray, it is an open source raytracing and global illumination renderer. For this video, it is used together with Blender 2.49. Yafaray extends Blender’s rendering capability by including Global illumination which is not available in the latter.

Yafaray is not limited for usage with Blender. As of this writing, it can also be used together with the latest version of Truespace which is version 7.61.

In my opinion, one of the most useable of the free biased Global Illumination renderer is Yafaray. You can now choose to use Yafaray, either with Blender 3D or Truespace. However, Yafaray does not comes with default settings that make good renderings.

For this article, we will focus on some Yafaray settings that aid in giving reasonable results. This screenshots below pertain to Yafaray for Blender 2.4X.

This article will not cover Yafaray basics. For learning the fundamentals of Yafaray, please click here.

1. Lower AA Threshold, coupled with multiple passes help to clean up grains more thoroughly. AA Threshold with value approximately or lower than 0.005 allow a tight scanning area for the passes to clean up the noise.

2. For Photon Mapping, diff radius appears to influence the intensity of image noise and white spots. Lower values tend to give nicer results. However, diff radius takes into account the real scale of the scene. If you do not need colour bleeding,  Direct Lighting + Use AO can give nice and fast result without image noise and white spots issues.

3. For creating caustics, Photon Mapping is the easier option. Use a small light source such as an area light or mesh light to focus a caustic effect.

4. Mesh lights can be used to create nice realistic lighting. In the example below, a hemisphere-shaped mesh is used as a mesh light.

The resultant rendering using Mesh light is shown below.

As a general rule, objects should also have wall thickness to prevent some of the problems with rendering artifact issues.

Well, these are some of the findings. Hope that these tips will be useful

>>> Click here to go back to Part 1

>>> Click here to go back to Part 2

In the Nodes Editor, click on Composite Nodes and Use Nodes to activate them.

By default, one input render layer and one output will appear in the Nodes window.

We need to add one additional Render Layer. To do so, go to Add >> Input >> Render Layers (as shown below).

Next we need to set the 2 Input layers to ‘Glows‘ and ‘Base‘ respectively. To do that, click on the up-down button of each Input node (as shown below).

In order to create the glowing effect from the ’Glows’ render layer input, we need to firstly blur it, followed by brightening the glow intensity.

To do that, firstly, add a Blur filter. To do so, go to Add >> Filter >> Blur. Give values of X and Y greater than zero. The greater the value, the bigger the glow size.  As for Blurring mode, my preference is Gaussian (Gauss).

Next, add a RGB Curve using Add >> Color >> RGB Curves. By default, the curve is an angled straight line. As in Photoshop, insert a knot and changing the curve shape will correspondingly change the RGB value. To get a brighter glow, pull the knot upwards.

Now, we need to find a way to integrate the glows onto the rest of the rendering. To do that, add a Mix node using Add >>  Color >> Mix. Note: In this node, use the Add mode. Factor set to about 1.oo.

Now, configure and connect the nodes as shown below:

The sequence should be as such:

Connection 1: ‘Glows‘ input render layer connects to Blur filter. Blur filter connects to RGB Curve. RGB Curve connects to the Add mix node.

Connection 2: ‘Base‘ input render layer connects to the lower image input of Add mix node.

Connection 3: Add node connects to Output Composite.

Once all this is done, go to the Scene(F10) Panel. Turn on Do Composite. Click the Render button.

If everything goes well, you should see the nice glows in the final rendering as shown below.

That’s all for this Blender 3D tutorial. Thanks for reading

>>> Click here to go back to Part 1 of this tutorial

Before we go into the Node Editor, we will firstly need to define and create the 2 Render Layers as described in Part 1. They are namely: ‘Glows’ & ‘Base’.

Firstly, assign all the glowing objects and lights onto a layer that is separated from the rest of the scene objects. The lights goes into this layer so that when this layer is rendered, the glow objects do not appear as black stuffs due to the lack of illumination.

If your glowing objects and lights are not already on a separate layer, shift-select all of them. Next, press ‘M’ key and assign them onto an empty layer.  In this tutorial example, it is in layer 2.

Now, we can go on to create the 2 render layers. To do that, go to the Scene (F10) panel. Click on the Render Layers Tab.

Rename ‘1 render layer’ as ‘base’. This is as shown below.

Once the ‘Base’ render layer has been created, we move on to create the ‘Glows’ Layer. To add a new layer, click on the up-down arrow button as shown below. Go to Add New and create a new layer call ‘glows’.

Under the layer section, turn on the layer where all the glowing objects are in. In this example, it is in layer 2. Turn off all other layers.

Next, press Ctrl button and click on the first layer button. A black dot will appear in the 1st layer button. This signifies that a layer mask has been created in layer 1. The purpose of the layer mask is to block off parts of the glowing objects that should not be included for glowing.

Next, for the ‘Glows’ layer, the Sky must be de-activated. This is an important and often overlooked point. The creation and modification of the ‘Glows’ layer is as shown below.

Once the 2 render layers have been created, we can go to the Node Editor to add and edit the necessary nodes configurations.

This is the end of Part 2 of the Blender glow tutorial.

>>> Click here to go to Part 3 of the Blender 3D Tutorial

This Blender 3D tutorial talks about using composite nodes to make certain objects in a scene glow.

The example below makes a comparision between a rendering with glow and one without. The rendering on the right show the lenses and button of the Videocam glowing.

The general process for creating the glows is outlined below:

1.  Create 2 different render layers:

A. One layer for all the glowing objects and lights. We can call this the ‘Glows Layer’.

B. Another layer for the general scene with every thing included. This layer must include the glowing objects and lights too. We can call this the ‘Base Layer’.

2. Using Blur filter to soften and diffuse the Glows Layer.

3. Use RGB Curve to control glow intensity of the Glows Layer.

4. Composite the 2 layers as a single rendering.

The Node Configuration is shown below:

This is the end of part 1 of this Blender 3D Tutorial. In Part 2, we will talk about the steps in detail.

>>> Click here to go to Part 2 of this Tutorial