YafRay 0.0.9 Released

For those new to Blender, YafRay is a free, open source ray tracing program integrated into Blender.  There has been lots of talk about where YafRay was headed (due to the slow development in the past months), but I think this release shows that YafRay is certainly not dead.

From the YafRay site:

Blender 2.42 is out and YafRay needed to be updated for working with it. So we have new YafRay release, about a year later of 0.0.8 version. In fact, this is a maintenance release with few (but important) changes. Greatest change is the project manager ;-) because Mathias Wein, a.k.a. Lynx, is at the head of YafRay development. Good luck, Lynx and thank you for getting involved in this insane project!

Here is a 0.0.9 changelog:

• New SAH-kdtree for mesh objects, which is hopefully mature now. Improvements include: Smaller memory footprint, more robust traversal (so holes in meshes should be history), faster ray-scene-intersection (depending on scene) due to new building algorithm (surface area heuristic and triangle clipping, preparing scene can take a bit longer though)
• Image loading code is more careful when trying to load files with unknown extension (crash-fixes)
• Added -p command line option for Linux to specify an alternative plugin path when rendering XML (yafray executable), YafRay also prints used plugin path and number of plugins loaded to console now.
• Changing number of threads with blender plugin now takes effect without restarting blender (blender 2.42 and later only)
• Fixed some minor bugs, code cleanups/updates for newer compilers and build-environments

Remember, in order to use Yafray in Blender, YafRay needs to be installed on your system.  You can find multi-platform installers here.  And you can be sure that 64-bit versions will show up on graphicall.