In the first two projects of the book, we used YafaRay to add extra realism to the project by using advanced lighting and materials. For the robot project, we will also use advanced ray tracing techniques, but not with YafaRay. The render engine that we will be using for the robot is called LuxRender, and it's another powerful option we use to create realistic images with Blender 3D.
LuxRender is a render engine that uses unbiased methods to calculate light, which means it's physically based. All light interactions and effects are based on real interactions, which makes it easy for us to produce realistic images. For this project, we will learn how to install and set up materials and lights to render with LuxRender.
A great feature of LuxRender, as compared to YafaRay, is the ability to pause and resume the render at any time. The rendered solution is saved to a file and can even resume the render in another computer.