LuxRender for Blender

I have been following the development of a number of renders over the past few years waiting for one to really stand out as being

• kickass quality
• well thought out interface
• easy to use
• opensource
• works well with Blender
• works on OSX

and it looks like Luxrender really has come up with the goods, it has taken over from Yafray for me as my easy to set up good quality renderer. The Blender internal is good but i don't always have the patience needed for mucking about to get it spot on, i would prefer a renderer do this for me. You need to experiment with the settings until you get the kind of setup you are happy with, but from then on its smooth sailing.

The blender exporter is starting to integrate really nicely with blender, there is even a use blender materials button which could be really handy. Don't forget if you are using uv textures make sure you map them to the uv co-ordinates instead of just leaving them in the unwrapper image browser in Blender.

Render time is obviously dependent on the scene but leaving things to run overnight should yield some good results, this is an unbiassed render engine so the longer you leave it the more refined the image becomes.

Check out luxrender at: http://www.luxrender.net/
Also Alan Brito has some excellent resources at: http://www.blender3darchitect.com/