Luxrender: Reality or Luxus

Oso3D

Yeah, I started with Ray Dream whicheverthefirstonewas, in the mid 90s. Heh.

 

Bobvan

Nyghtfall said:

Bobvan said:

Nyghtfall said:

One thing's for certain.  Following this thread has made me want to play with Reality again, and I hate you all for it.  :P

I am going to revisit it too with my new killer rig. Worse comes to worse I still think its not worth it carry on with iray which now just flies!

LOL Its good to be able to sell commish projects. Edit I want to thank you, Your advise on how to render without any time limit in iray panned pan out the best even now..

Nyghtfall said:

I looked up that new CPU you bought, and I hate you most of all.  20 threads?!?!  I'm flipping you off in 48 different languages!  >:(

 

Bobvan

timmins.william said:

Yeah, I started with Ray Dream whicheverthefirstonewas, in the mid 90s. Heh.

 

You been at this for a while 09 for me..

Oso3D

Well, I had long periods where I gave up; late 90s I had given up for a while because the hardware to make anything even remotely good was way out of my reach, and even then I kept having to buy new software I could barely afford every year or two.

Had a brief period where I tried to resume in the early 2000s before, again, giving up.

A few years ago I was trying to put together a game supplement and despairing at affording even 'cheap' clipart, and looked around at what maybe I could try to do myself. Discovered Daz, and, welp, skyrocketed from there.

 

Bobvan

timmins.william said:

Well, I had long periods where I gave up; late 90s I had given up for a while because the hardware to make anything even remotely good was way out of my reach, and even then I kept having to buy new software I could barely afford every year or two.

Had a brief period where I tried to resume in the early 2000s before, again, giving up.

A few years ago I was trying to put together a game supplement and despairing at affording even 'cheap' clipart, and looked around at what maybe I could try to do myself. Discovered Daz, and, welp, skyrocketed from there.

Cool beans bro. I used to draw my own MAD comics when I was 11, I drum so I always been artistic so this is not a stretch. I make 300 to 500 render TV episode style. This is why I think I have done Ok with selling commish projects plus it is in a form of macrophilia adult entertainment..

timmins.william said:

 

 

marble

wolf359 said:

 

"It might be of interest to note that, since this thread was originally about Luxrender, then Blender does (or did?) have an interface to Luxrender (LuxBlend) as well as Cycles. It must be something of a testimony to Cycles that most of the Blender community seem to prefer it over Luxrender."

Yes I remember those times
Not quite sure what the issues with luxblend were, but a former head fellow at Octane jumped ship to the Blender organization and bought alot of his knowedge to developing cycles.
There was a bit of a row about the whole thing IIRCC.

 

"I tried the teleblender script on my iMac before I got a PC with an NVidia GPU. I found that it wasn't as straightforward as just send and render."

 

Honestly the Mac version was always a bit rubbish compared to the PC version and I dont believe there is an up to date Mac version available anymore.

 

 

I also seem to remember that you need to use the 3DL materials because the script doesn't handle Iray materials - or has this changed since then?

wolf359

"I also seem to remember that you need to use the 3DL materials because the script doesn't handle Iray materials - or has this changed since then?"

 

Hi  it depends on what you consider a true "IRay material"
100 percent Iray procedural materials such the free metals and opaques ,emissives,cloth,rubber etc, that come pre installed with DS 4.8 or higher will not be properly converted by the teleblend script.

But that is not a problem for me as I prefer the native PBR shaders of blender for such non organic materials  anyway.

However most of the so called "IRay" versions  of  newer content such as Hair
skin,clothing and props apparently are still image based and I assume 
"Converted" for IRay as they convert just fine to Blender cycle nodes.
The Stonemason Tuscany set image I posted earlier was the"IRay" version.

khorneV2

Thanks for exposing blender cycles possibilty.

I will add my contribution with my own test

this is a test with a 2011 laptop core i3 done in about 20min at 130 samples (1 ibl, 2 area lights, 1 sunlight) transferred with mcjteleblender 3 beta.

great performance IMHO  !

wolf359

Nice to not be  brutally punished for not owning a specific graphic card from a specific manufacturer..

khorneV2

indeed

 

kyoto kid

khorneV2 said:

Thanks for exposing blender cycles possibilty.

I will add my contribution with my own test

this is a test with a 2011 laptop core i3 done in about 20min at 130 samples (1 ibl, 2 area lights, 1 sunlight) transferred with mcjteleblender 3 beta.

great performance IMHO  !

...looks really nice.

kyoto kid

wolf359 said:

Nice to not be  brutally punished for not owning a specific graphic card from a specific manufacturer..

...I can definitely agree on that. 

Alas, wish I could find an option that was affordable and not extremely difficult to work with.  Seems both are mutually exclusive of each other.

khorneV2

I did my test in 1 day with no knowledge of blender, i just followed the manual and a few tutorials

wolf359

khorneV2 said:

I did my test in 1 day with no knowledge of blender, i just followed the manual and a few tutorials

But you learned just enough to get that render
I call it :
"Objective Based Learning"

I aquire just enough knowledge to acheive a predefined creative objective 
(an exploding planet in after effects etc,)

and I simply ignore all othe other features of the program to be studied  later when/if I need them someday.

marble

wolf359 said:

khorneV2 said:

I did my test in 1 day with no knowledge of blender, i just followed the manual and a few tutorials

But you learned just enough to get that render
I call it :
"Objective Based Learning"

I aquire just enough knowledge to acheive a predefined creative objective 
(an exploding planet in after effects etc,)

and I simply ignore all othe other features of the program to be studied  later when/if I need them someday.

That seems to be my approach to learning Blender. Trying to tackle the whole thing through a series of courses was not working for me. So first I learned how to navigate - just enough to get me around the screen and able to turn and view object on the screen. Then I learned a little about the sculpting tools so that I could make adjustment morphs for clothing (having tried ZBush some years ago, Blender was surprisingly similar in sculpt mode). Next I learned the Video Sequence Editor - most useful for making short movie clips from my DAZ animations which are saved as image series. Lately I've been playing with the edit tools but not for modelling - it just seems that they are more suited to some purposes than the sculpt tools.

I'll definitely have another go at Cycles now that I have a PC and can run the latest teleblender script.

wolf359

" Trying to tackle the whole thing through a series of courses was not working for me. So first I learned how to navigate - just enough to get me around the screen and able to turn and view object on the screen. Then I learned a little about the sculpting tools so that I could make adjustment morphs for clothing "

It is  the way I have always learned CG/ 3D graphics
and I apply it to other areas of life as well.
If I have a desire to cook Egg plant for one meal 
why would I enroll in a complete culinary course
at city college here in new york,??
when I could simply google it and follow some online tutorial for this one task.

 

khorneV2

Another random test, with some free blender own shaders.

17mn 130 samples progressive 1 ibl, 2 area light & 1 emissive shader

Nice result 

Regards

Robert Freise

wolf359 said:

I can still remember using carraras "ancestor" RayDream 3D
 I was a carrara user up to about version 4 then I became a C4D user.

Same here

My first 3d program came on 5.25 disks and was for DOS can't remember the name now but you had to type in the coordinates for each point

wolf359

For easy HDRI lighting set up in blender, I highly recommend
getting the FREE  SIBLGUI application.

http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/framework.html

there are also alot of free HDRIs on that site as well
if you do not already own any

and the free dynamic sky add on for instant Bryce like skieswith GI

http://www.dragoneex.com/downloads/dynamic-skyadd-on

PPehrson

Richard Haseltine said:

...never used Luxus though did use Reality (2.0. & 2.5) and it allows you to close the scene and even Daz programne after submitting the file to LuxRender saving system resources. The one downside, it is glacially slow in CPU mode. Also you need an AMD GPU card for GPU rendering as Lux does not support CUDA. Reality in a way is like using the standalone RIB 3DL render engine, so I would imagine it could be run on a networked render system.

nVidia cards do support OpenCL, though I am told less well than AMD cards. Still, you should certainly see soem benfit from an nVidia GPU comapred to CPU-only.

This is incredibly incorrect. nVidia has done a lot more effort in hardware processing and supported opencl for a lot of time. Some very big AMD cards can perform better but only in OpenCL where nVidia excels with CUDA which is a lot better and faster. For production, nVidia is the way to go still.

Platnumk

Even tho Luxus intergrate with daz studio it hasn't been updated in the last 10yrs or so & you will have to search the internet for a compatible copy of Luxrender as that is not included.

Reality went open source & Paolo has dropped support for it,  also most of the servers that contain the liecence keys are now owned by a 3rd party (if these servers should every go offline then the software will not work).

Reality was built around 3Delight Shaders & does not fully support iRay shaders (a lot of tweaking in Reality's Material pane will be need to get iRay shaders to look correct),  The official Reality Forums has also been shut down so you would be relying on old users for help.

Both Luxus & Reality require compatible lights,  With Luxus you will need to convert DS Lights to Luxrender Lights & With Reality you would get best results by using Mesh Lights & HDRI tho some DS Lights are supported.

On a personal note I would think about going with iRay as its built into DS,  If you don't have a compatible nVidia GFX card then you can still render using CPU (tho it will be much slower than a dedicated gfx card).