Yafaray is a ray-tracing rendering engine that uses the Monte Carlo method (which depends on random sampling to speed along computations) in calculating a scene's light.
Farm-Supported
Yafaray is a fairly well-known renderer and some commercial render farms officially support it, so you can submit jobs and have Yafaray work for you in the “cloud”.
Features
Yafaray has a number of optimisations to help you get good performance without relying on OpenCL or CUDA. It has advanced features like volumetrics, several texture types, and various illumination types.
Easy Setup
Yafaray is a serious renderer, and yet quite simple to set up with Blender.
Big
Yafaray is a serious, professional renderer. If you're just learning how to model or light, it might be overkill as an initial rendering engine since it may produce unexpected results if you don't understand the rendering process. A simple “never fail” renderer, like Blender's inbuilt default, might be better to start on.
Installing Yafaray is heavily dependent upon the version of Blender you run, so check on http://yafaray.org to see what the latest version released for your version of Blender that you run.
If the version available on http://slackbuilds.org is current, install from there. If not, install from the Yafaray site.
Yafaray offers a .zip
file for 64bit Linux. Assuming you are installing for systemwide use:
/opt/blender/2.xx/scripts/addons/
.The Blender can be activated and used the same as any other Blender plugin:
Access the Yafaray options in the Render panel of Blender.