Yafray

I’ve heard about Yafray so much and I’ve seen that it can deliver VERY photorealistic shots. The Blender internal renderer is not bad - as a matter of fact, it’s awesome. However, for all the really realistic stuff people tend to use Yafray. I tried to use it before, but all I got was a blank screen. Today, doing some research, I found out that, for some reason, the lights need to be jacked up in order for Yafray to work. Click on any of the pictures to see a larger size.

For my first example, a nice simple frame from my bouncing ball animation, I had to take the light from 1 to 6 in intensity to get it to look similar in light intensity to the Blender internal renderer. Here’s how they look. They pretty much look the same to me, perhaps you can see a difference.

Then I decided to render the glass from my final exam. If anything, that should give a good example of how much more realistic Yafray is. I didn’t change any of the default Yafray settings. I didn’t use the exact same setup in this one for both shots because I forgot to save the file after setting it up last night. It took a while to render - over 20 minutes. I didn’t want to do it again, so I wasn’t super scientific. It looks clearly much worse with Yafray. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong here? All I did was tweak the lights so that it wasn’t darkness.

Finally, I wanted to try one more thing to see if it really looks different when it counts. Here’s a shot of water hitting my glass. Here, the Yafray render doesn’t look as bad as above, but I still prefer the internal render.

So does anyone have an idea of what I’m doing wrong? Or is this the way it should be? I am using the latest Yafray and Blender stable builds - or whatever is in the Fedora repositories.