Attached Link: atomic desing

recently there has been much debate at which rendering engine is the best.  this question hard to answer as each rendering engine is designed for a different purpose with different pros and cons Yafray-     a plugin rendering engine with intent on rendering speed and quality and even photorealism. yafray maintains a balence between speed and photorealism which is useful for artists making animations of realistic scenes.      pros-        can render fast        can render realisticaly        has gi           hdri lighting        has dof        works as a plugin in blender        the settings are very editable        glow lights        supports refinement        shows indepth render progress in comand line        supports full multithreading        supports ray tracing (including caustics)     cons-        yafray is not intended and does not have a capiability for artistic renders)        does not support halo materials        fewer settings for translucency and reflectivity (mostly lack of different frensels for these)           no specular opacity setting        does not support ambient occlusion        can be slow (if settings are wrong)        does not support zbuffer transparency (i dont think it does, not sure)

Blender internal
    blender's internal rendering engine was developed only for blender.  it is focused more                 towards artistic renders than speed renders
    pros-
       halo materials
       full textures support
       zbuffer and raytraced transparencies
       ambient occlusion
    cons-
       its actualy quite slow (even thoughmany people think yafray is slower, but settings just take             time to learn)
       harder to make acurite glass
       no glow lights
       no hdri
       no global illumination
       no raytracing (caustics and radiosity)
           radiosity calculated by ambient occlusion or before hand
       no dof (at least currently its not working too well)
       grainy renders when using ambient occlusion or extreemly long render times
       hardly any support for multithreading

INDIGO!
    an external rendering engine with intent on unbiased super photorealistic renders and                     similarity to the commercial unbiased renderer maxwell.  currently it is free but there is                 some talk of it costing more in the future although not nearly as much as maxwell
   
    Pros
       raytracing (thats the whole concept)
       unbiased
       fully working fully supported dof (something neither yafray or bi acheive)
          doesnt add much to render times
       fully multi threaded (many threads supported)
       hdri lighting schemes supported. 
       superphotorealistic
       paper tints supported
       supports comand line
       easy to shut off a render
       takes up almost no ram
       can shut off at any point and still have a saved image
       exporting works (about half the time)
       file format easily editable in notepad or some sort of xml editor
       rendering settings edditable
       saves a log of renders
       mesh lights supported (any shape light you want)
       sun lights supported
       spot lights supported
       always has cuastics if there are caustics to have
       ior works for reflective materials (ie gold, silver, copper... as compared to yafrays where                     gold looks the same with a 1.33 ior as it does with a 2 ior or 3 ior)
       will render indefinitly or definitly untill you are satasfied with render quality
       nk data files
   CONS.
       almost all renders take from 3 hours up.  
             calculated at around 1 hour (vase scene) for a 200150 pixel render
                   12 (wasnt actualy enough) for same scene 800600 render
        hard to export working file without needing notebook edits
        GRAINY RENDERS.  many renders have artifacts even with render times up to 12 hours
                artifacts can be white, noticed most often in scenes with glass
         no GUI- hard to edit settings
         closed source although realeased under the GPL liscence
             means that the creator can stop production any time he likes
             slower developtmen process than it could be (although still pretty quick)
          no artistic renders
             no glow lights or halo lights
              no support for particles
              no support for physics deformed objects (like fluid simulation)
          you need to know a little programing to use it
          not many types of materials supported
          only one type of diffuse shader
          practicaly no settings for glass or transparent objects (other than transmisity, color, absorbtion, and ior)
                because of its nature however, not many settings are needed.
          little support for textures
              only color and
                possibly normals
             must be an image texture
          no support for node materials
          error with more than 1 material per mesh
       no oversampling
       no refinement
       no way to bias renders to loose artifacts
       no antialiassing
       no internal blender support (render from blender)
          no blender-indigo build like yafray-blender or yafaray-blender builds

All three renderers are infact spectacular renderers.  however, yafray is still my favorite renderer.  its combination of speed and abilities makes it the most logical renderer for much of my work.  of the three blender's internal is my least favorite because of its slow speed combined with command line progress, multithreading, and realism.  the quality of the renders from yafray is far better than thoes from either bi's or indigo's.  the realism from yafray is far superior to that of blender internal's however indigo wins in that area.

in conclusion, Indigo has the potential to overpower yafray if just a couple issues were addressed.  all indigo needs to do is to adress the issues of speed, artifacts, a gui and open   source.  if indigo were to be as fast as yafray, the fastest, and have as clean render's as yafray's then indigo would be the best renderer. in the meantime, yafray remains the most logical choice of renderers.

there has been lots of talk of the developtment of yafray being dead.  this is not the case.  the new version of yafray .9 seemed so simmilar to yafray .8 that people questioned weather there was any change but a compatability change.   i am fairly sure that .9 has some vast improved internal code changes as well as changes effecting its speed. 

btw people, i would appreaciate it greatly if you would all visit my site www.atomicdesign.org and send that link to somebody else.