Chapter 29. From Blender to YafRay Using YableX

Table of Contents

What is Yable?
Which Yable?
Where to get YableX?
Installing the script
The Interface
Workflow philosophy.
Global Settings
Material Setting
Light Settings
Yable Juicy example

Relevant to Blender v2.31

by Manuel Bastioni

What is Yable?

Yable is a Python script, originally devised by Andrea Carbone, allowing to export the Blender scene in the XML format of YafRay, so to be able to exploit that engine for highly photorealistic renderings. However, Yable is not a mere "format converter", but is a true scene processing lab that allows you to assign and change the lights, materials and environmental settings taking full advantage of YafRay features. From another point of view we could consider Yable script as a GUI, able to visualize and manage with great simplicity the large quantity of parameters used by YafRay.

Which Yable?

The first versions of Yable (end of 2002) have been realised entirely by Andrea and, afterwards, as a result of the success of the script among the users, many different versions of the script have been issued, to correct bugs and add new features. It is important to point out the contribution of Alejandro Conty Estévez, Alfredo "Eeshlo" de Greef, Christoffer Green, Leope, Johnny "guitargeek" Matthews, Jean-Michel "jms" Soler.

After the official release of Yable 0.30 many non-official patches has been issued, generically called YableX, and published on the Yable forum on www.Kino3d.com. For the purpose of this Chapter we have examined all those versions to come up with a new "official" version and decided to base it on the latest YableX release that, thanks to modifications carry out by Jms, works with the last release of Blender.

Where to get YableX?

The two main Blender sites, which you should know by now, have links to it, anyway the last version has been realized by Jms and can be downloaded from his site Zoo-Blender (http://www.zoo-logique.org/3D.Blender). I recommend, however, that you have a look at the official YafRay forum, in the exporters section: http://www.YafRay.org