Luxus discussion

Bobvan

Problem with that method is if one is using ibl or the sun it will make the backdrop invisible. This is also a workaround if someone forgets to add the alpha channel in Reality not sure how you make BG invisible in luxus

SphericLabs

Bobvan said:

Problem with that method is if one is using ibl or the sun it will make the backdrop invisible. This is also a workaround if someone forgets to add the alpha channel in Reality not sure how you make BG invisible in luxus

You can make it invisible in the Studio interface. You can do the Luxus - LuxRender Material and change its type to null.

Bobvan

I know that but I was referring to making the BG invisible like if you wanted to just render a character lets say to add as a PNG file

Here is something I made in my 1st few days SLG rendered the room and added character as a separate PNG render & PS magic

http://fav.me/d4somlh

Matt-D

SphericLabs said:

If you are using the GUI, you can save it to anywhere, and you will want to do so. Do a File -> Export To Image -> Save Tonemapped Low Dynamic Range Image.

Never used lux to save the image out directly before. Use to be a problem with it and i am use to having it saved automatically along with the lxm file (if thats the right file type im thinking of) But no matter, I am liking this. I see I will need to better familiarize myself with more technical info about Lux which is fine.

Thank you SphericLabs.

SphericLabs

Caboose said:

SphericLabs said:

If you are using the GUI, you can save it to anywhere, and you will want to do so. Do a File -> Export To Image -> Save Tonemapped Low Dynamic Range Image.

Never used lux to save the image out directly before. Use to be a problem with it and i am use to having it saved automatically along with the lxm file (if thats the right file type im thinking of) But no matter, I am liking this. I see I will need to better familiarize myself with more technical info about Lux which is fine.

Thank you SphericLabs.

I think that you can use a trick and turn off all your lights(make sure you have at least one daz light) and render in 3Delight. That image can be your mask.

mjc1016

Kattey said:

Rareth said:

Kattey said:

Anybody had the problem when after using Luxus and switching back to regular 3Dlight DS stucks on "optimization of textures" part if any other shader (uberSurface, pwSurface) were later applied?

you might try saving the scene, closing DAZ and then relaunching it.

Yes, I did that but it is uncomfortable
Is this is a known issue?

Don't know if it is a 'known issue', but DS can do that switching between Scripted 3Delight and regular renders, too...there are two possible causes that spring to mind and restarting DS takes care of both. The first is tdlmake 'hangs'...this means it gets stuck on converting one image and won't move on to the next. The other is tdlmake 'loops', for some reason it repeatedly converts the same image. If you stop the render and have some means of finding and killing the running tdlmake and then clear the temp folder, you can try again, without having to restart DS...but you will need something other than TaskManager to do so (something like Process Explorer...it shows all the child processes and allows them to be stopped individually)...basically everything shutting down and restarting DS does.

Male-M3dia

Kattey said:

Rareth said:

Kattey said:

Anybody had the problem when after using Luxus and switching back to regular 3Dlight DS stucks on "optimization of textures" part if any other shader (uberSurface, pwSurface) were later applied?

you might try saving the scene, closing DAZ and then relaunching it.

Yes, I did that but it is uncomfortable
Is this is a known issue?

I've had this happen even before this plugin was available. Saving and closing usually clears up whatever resource is hanging the render.

KickAir 8P

StratDragon said:

@KickAir 8P
Personal Data? You mean a name and an email address? Unfortunately there may be some bad apples out there who might take advantage of a program developers decision to not include some type of security to prevent their work from being... can't think of the word, maybe it doesn't exist. not saying that that sort of thing happens, ever, on the internet.

This might be too far off-topic, but since you ask: I had little objection to the security on Reality originally (a serial number provided by the DAZ site), but DAZ 3D™ is a privately-held corporation which (semi-recent website issues aside) has security in place to prevent a data breach and certain legal responsibilities in that area. Paulo's business is (or was at the time I stopped using Reality) a sole proprietorship -- if he goes bankrupt anyone could buy it, if he gets divorced his wife could seize it, if he (God forbid) dies it belongs to his heirs and we're back to anyone could buy it.

Just because I gave certain personal information to DAZ in order to facilitate our business relationship doesn't mean I was (or should be) willing to give that info to an individual I know only through the internet in exchange for a second off-site registration when the DAZ registration should've been sufficient.

StratDragon

Male-M3dia said:

Kattey said:

Rareth said:

Kattey said:

Anybody had the problem when after using Luxus and switching back to regular 3Dlight DS stucks on "optimization of textures" part if any other shader (uberSurface, pwSurface) were later applied?

you might try saving the scene, closing DAZ and then relaunching it.

Yes, I did that but it is uncomfortable
Is this is a known issue?

I've had this happen even before this plugin was available. Saving and closing usually clears up whatever resource is hanging the render.

This still happens in 4.5? It's a hangup of the MakeTDL function within 3Delight. I hoped they got this bug by now. Yep, close DS, reopen, that's the fix, nothing to do with the plugin so keep calm, carry on.

Soto

StratDragon said:

This still happens in 4.5? It's a hangup of the MakeTDL function within 3Delight. I hoped they got this bug by now. Yep, close DS, reopen, that's the fix, nothing to do with the plugin so keep calm, carry on.

Yes this happens a LOT in 4.5 and its VERY annoying.

Kattey

Oh, so this isn't Luxus problem, good to know. Strange, I never had it before.

Matt-D

SphericLabs said:

Caboose said:

SphericLabs said:

If you are using the GUI, you can save it to anywhere, and you will want to do so. Do a File -> Export To Image -> Save Tonemapped Low Dynamic Range Image.

Never used lux to save the image out directly before. Use to be a problem with it and i am use to having it saved automatically along with the lxm file (if thats the right file type im thinking of) But no matter, I am liking this. I see I will need to better familiarize myself with more technical info about Lux which is fine.

Thank you SphericLabs.

I think that you can use a trick and turn off all your lights(make sure you have at least one daz light) and render in 3Delight. That image can be your mask.

Think you got the wrong quote.

Jabba

Test render using single light and shader presets

Rendered up to 2.5K in just 20mins using SLG... SLG can't handle complex shaders, so the blue is the "green gloss" shader with the colours manually changed to blue.

Some of my earlier test renders seemed to stop rendering despite me not having set any sample or time limits, but can't tell if it's Luxus or not, albeit never had similar issue using Reality (maybe due to not saving out the lxs files etc?)

It's certainly got tons of potential - If there was a real-time shader preview, it would make adjustments much easier to refine... maybe a potential upgrade some time in the future?

ScarletX1969

Hmmmm, I guess my question, being one line, was totally overlooked, so let me try again...@Spheric Labs, where exactly is the user manual for Luxus. I just bought it yesterday and upon installing, could not find any type of documentation nor where to truly begin using the plugin within the software.

Thanks.

SphericLabs

Jabba101 said:

Test render using single light and shader presets

Rendered up to 2.5K in just 20mins using SLG... SLG can't handle complex shaders, so the blue is the "green gloss" shader with the colours manually changed to blue.

Some of my earlier test renders seemed to stop rendering despite me not having set any sample or time limits, but can't tell if it's Luxus or not, albeit never had similar issue using Reality (maybe due to not saving out the lxs files etc?)

It's certainly got tons of potential - If there was a real-time shader preview, it would make adjustments much easier to refine... maybe a potential upgrade some time in the future?

Maybe even a realtime spot render.

SphericLabs

dsexton72 said:

Hmmmm, I guess my question, being one line, was totally overlooked, so let me try again...@Spheric Labs, where exactly is the user manual for Luxus. I just bought it yesterday and upon installing, could not find any type of documentation nor where to truly begin using the plugin within the software.

Thanks.

Sorry. Here is the readme
-> http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/15891/start

Here is the manual, link can also be found in the readme
-> http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/public/read_me/index/15891/15891_luxus-manual.pdf

ScarletX1969

Sorry. Here is the readme
-> http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/15891/start

Here is the manual, link can also be found in the readme
-> http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/public/read_me/index/15891/15891_luxus-manual.pdf

Thank you, maybe now I can contribute with what I find. It looks awesome and since I have both (Reality 2.5 and Luxus), I can see which won works better to continue support.

Salem2007

I apologize if this has been asked and answered already--there are a lot of threads for Luxus right now. I bought this yesterday and it seems to be working pretty well. I loaded the Ready to Render scene from Daz Studio (the dragon in the alchamy chasm) and got some decent results---biggest issue was a general washed out look. I noticed that the promo image for Luxus was the same dragon scene--if the person who rendered that in Luxus reads this, would you share the settings you used? It helps me to see examples with the settings so I can correlate the results.

Thanks in advance.

mjc1016

Post a screenshot or render of what you are getting...

In general, the Alchemy Chasm setup has way too much going on in the lighting department to use without adjustments.

Czexana

I'm liking the way that Luxus is integrated into DS, and the nice way that textures convert. The 'Extra Parameters' options are pure genius :-)

However, I do have a couple of bits of constructive criticism:

Render settings - Lux has some good default render settings, that work well in most cases, but I do not know what they are. When the render settings are written out from Luxus it writes out everything and all these good defaults are stomped on because I do not know what a lot of the parameters should be set to. It would be nice if either the default settings (that come up when you hit the reset render settings button) were Lux's defaults or that only user modified render settings were written to the file, so Lux could fill in the defaults. Currently I'm finding myself copying and pasting the render settings from a Reality render as the image converges much faster with less fireflies than I can get playing with the Luxus settings.

Texture gamma - I notice that every texture map is gamma corrected. This is not optimal, particularly for opacity and bump maps. I'm not sure whether you have Reality, or were around the DS community as it was being developed, but I remember there was some good discussion about this and it was concluded that gamma correction was only really useful for diffuse colour maps. Possibly the other colour maps for specular and subsurface could be gamma corrected, but the 'amount' maps like opacity and bump should not be gamma corrected as it leads to stringy trans-mapped hair and flattened bumps.

Anyway, thanks for the effort you've put into this plugin, and I'm looking forward to trying the brick based system you have in beta - I've always thought that Lux textures were more akin to this than a simple shader based system, so well done :coolsmile:

SphericLabs

Salem2007 said:

I apologize if this has been asked and answered already--there are a lot of threads for Luxus right now. I bought this yesterday and it seems to be working pretty well. I loaded the Ready to Render scene from Daz Studio (the dragon in the alchamy chasm) and got some decent results---biggest issue was a general washed out look. I noticed that the promo image for Luxus was the same dragon scene--if the person who rendered that in Luxus reads this, would you share the settings you used? It helps me to see examples with the settings so I can correlate the results.

Thanks in advance.

Lets see if scene sharing really works. Here is thea zipped up duf file.

-> http://sphericlabs.com/scratch/dragonslayer.zip

Although on this one I adjusted the lighting after the fact in the GUI. I changed the Tone Mapping kernel to Linear and then adjusted the SunSky light down and the Distant Light up.

SphericLabs

czexana said:

I'm liking the way that Luxus is integrated into DS, and the nice way that textures convert. The 'Extra Parameters' options are pure genius :-)

However, I do have a couple of bits of constructive criticism:

Render settings - Lux has some good default render settings, that work well in most cases, but I do not know what they are. When the render settings are written out from Luxus it writes out everything and all these good defaults are stomped on because I do not know what a lot of the parameters should be set to. It would be nice if either the default settings (that come up when you hit the reset render settings button) were Lux's defaults or that only user modified render settings were written to the file, so Lux could fill in the defaults. Currently I'm finding myself copying and pasting the render settings from a Reality render as the image converges much faster with less fireflies than I can get playing with the Luxus settings.

Texture gamma - I notice that every texture map is gamma corrected. This is not optimal, particularly for opacity and bump maps. I'm not sure whether you have Reality, or were around the DS community as it was being developed, but I remember there was some good discussion about this and it was concluded that gamma correction was only really useful for diffuse colour maps. Possibly the other colour maps for specular and subsurface could be gamma corrected, but the 'amount' maps like opacity and bump should not be gamma corrected as it leads to stringy trans-mapped hair and flattened bumps.

Anyway, thanks for the effort you've put into this plugin, and I'm looking forward to trying the brick based system you have in beta - I've always thought that Lux textures were more akin to this than a simple shader based system, so well done :coolsmile:

I like the render settings idea. The gamma correction is based on that Texture Gamma settings. A texture Gamma of 1.0 mean no gamma correction, which is the default.

But sounds like you only want the Texture Gamma to apply to diffuse?

Salem2007

SphericLabs said:

Salem2007 said:

I apologize if this has been asked and answered already--there are a lot of threads for Luxus right now. I bought this yesterday and it seems to be working pretty well. I loaded the Ready to Render scene from Daz Studio (the dragon in the alchamy chasm) and got some decent results---biggest issue was a general washed out look. I noticed that the promo image for Luxus was the same dragon scene--if the person who rendered that in Luxus reads this, would you share the settings you used? It helps me to see examples with the settings so I can correlate the results.

Thanks in advance.

Lets see if scene sharing really works. Here is thea zipped up duf file.

-> http://sphericlabs.com/scratch/dragonslayer.zip

Although on this one I adjusted the lighting after the fact. I changed the Tone Mapping kernel to Linear and then adjusted the SunSky light down and the Distant Light up.

Cooll, thanks! I'll check it out after I get home tonight and let you know what happens.....

3dtoday

Bobvan said:

I know that but I was referring to making the BG invisible like if you wanted to just render a character lets say to add as a PNG file

Here is something I made in my 1st few days SLG rendered the room and added character as a separate PNG render & PS magic

http://fav.me/d4somlh

COOL. How are u guys getting SLG to work? I downloaded the test build, but dont know what settings to use?

thanks

SphericLabs

3dtoday said:

Bobvan said:

I know that but I was referring to making the BG invisible like if you wanted to just render a character lets say to add as a PNG file

Here is something I made in my 1st few days SLG rendered the room and added character as a separate PNG render & PS magic

http://fav.me/d4somlh

COOL. How are u guys getting SLG to work? I downloaded the test build, but dont know what settings to use?

thanks

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/18543/P165/#273349

jax_512b7aea09

SphericLabs:

I just wanted to post a quick thank you for this plug-in.

I recently started learning how to use LuxRender with Reality, and I love the renders but don't like having to redo the material settings in reality all the time.

Putting those settings right on the surfaces tab will save me many hours of work and headaches.

And I certainly won't be complaining about the price!

Thank you. :)

Rareth

not bad, set up a simple scene, with 1 spot light 25 minutes 350 s/p, background is still a big noisy, but I paused the render to do an exported image, here it is so far, going to resume the render and see what I get after another 30 minutes

Geminii23

Bluebird 3D said:

(Copied here from the MO forum to help with the discussion. Forum admins - So sorry for the duplicate! I hope it is okay!)

I’ve had the pleasure of testing this plugin over the past few weeks leading up to it’s release. Here is a summary of my experience thus far:

- Luxus translates Studio materials well but you still have to tweak some settings. This is due to the differences between the way biased and unbiased render engines work. The easiest example I can share is having to change the default diffuse color to anything but pure white (IE: 255, 255, 255) in the Studio surfaces tab. Since a lot of PA, myself included, do not bother changing this default color when we are using a texture, there are a lot of adjustments to be made here. It only takes a couple of minutes, depending on the complexity of your scene.

- Luxus exposes all of the native material options available in LuxRender. If you do not want to use the Studio settings, you can just choose one of them instead and it will override the Studio material for Lux.

- Luxus defaults to a decent set of render parameters right out of the box which means that provided you have a decent lighting rig, you can expect to see predictable results. However, if you do not have a decent lighting rig, there is nothing this plugin can do for you to fix that. There is no getting around good lighting.

Training is coming!

I am making a video tutorial series to help out with all of these questions. I expect to have it wrapped up and shipped to Daz by Friday and from there it is up to them when it will be released.

.... On a personal side….

I love this plugin. It stays out of my way and lets me focus on what I want to do, which is to create fun renders. I don’t care about mathematical light scatter theory or detailed explanations of what different surface types mean to the physical laws of nature. I speak this language: Less shiny. More shiny. Okay that’s pretty…. Luxus allows me to think the way I think and then it goes off in the background and stays quiet.

I’ll leave you with some of my own renders in progress. These were done in LuxRender via the Luxus plugin.

~Bluebird

I grabbed the plugin before it was too late, but haven't had a chance to play with it. Your renders look beautiful. I really want to be able to achieve more natural and lifelike looking renders. So I can't wait for your tutorials.

Thanks.

thomas.alenfors_687cd07385

To render with alpha channel

Insert :
Film "fleximage" "bool premultiplyalpha" ["true"]

In the extra settings field

Bobvan

Really there is not a function in the plugin?