Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
The only thing Reality does better than Luxus is surface translation in certain cases [and depending how you look at it, the ACSEL database]. Luxus has the edge on integration with both DAZ Studio and LuxRender, and on tweaking surfaces, lights, and volumes.
Perhaps but most luxus renders I see including promos for the product & tutorials are not close the the ones by Reality artists Like Mike Charley & Anton...
R3 will have all of that and prolly with less headaches
The mods have put stops to every thread that has turned into a Reality vs. Luxus slugfest. So I suggest we all try to nip that here before this thread goes the same way. Personally, I use Reality, but I'm more than happy to answer questions about what I've learned of LuxRender and how it works and handles materials/etc, regardless of which exporter is used. Let's try to keep this thread about LuxRender, and not digress into another exporter war.
You never did join us at rendo... War? I thought we were having a conversation but I digress...
I will never, ever post at Rendo. Period. I have my reasons. But I am happy to chime in here, at Paolo's new official forums over at RDNA, and on the LuxRender forums themselves.
I will never, ever post at Rendo. Period. I have my reasons. But I am happy to chime in here, at Paolo's new official forums over at RDNA, and on the LuxRender forums themselves.
That sounds kinda bitter I won't ask..
As I have both products, I'm happy to learn about both and use either if I think I can get better results. You and several others have been extremely helpful so I would not like to give the moderators cause for concern. I will try to steer clear of making comparisons but I would not like to see a situation where we are confined to Luxus discussion because Reality is no longer sold from the DAZ store. After all, getting great results form Reality will only encourage me to buy more DAZ products to render, surely.
I think R3 is going to be sick! I guess what I like about it is the simplicity of it. I have been using it for 14 months I am used to the flow & how to get what I want out of it. I have no interest in having to plug in manual text and editing XLS files & preforming voo doo rituals . I too have offered tips on the Luxus forum and no longer do so for my Reasons...
That means good, right? (I'm an OLD man) ;)
LOL Me too yeah its going to rock! At the end of the day the Luxrender is a nice engine...
I don't think that's necessary. Discussion about how to do something in either plugin, or even how they handle configuring the same thing differently should be fine. It's just that I got the vibe of "X is better than Y" starting to crop up, having seen the early stages of that in several other threads already that the mods eventually stepped into. Saying X handles Z better than Y from a technical merit/factual point of view is still a valid statement, as it may help people to understand how to workaround/implement Z in Y. I just think the opinion/subjective side should be kept out.
Yeah I guess some things never change. Reminds me of when I was into video hockey. There was 2K & EA sports back in 03 / 04 same sort of thing but this being much more civilized.
Agreed.
@marble: shader=math function that describes the light to surface interaction.
Luxus uses the same render engine as Reality, of course, so check that you are comparing like for like (in particular use so-called "linear" in all the drop-downs that allow it, except tonemapper which can be any).
Perhaps but most luxus renders I see including promos for the product & tutorials are not close the the ones by Reality artists Like Mike Charley & Anton...
R3 will have all of that and prolly with less headaches
The Luxus promos were...lacking. They didn't show off the end result so much as the exporter itself. The final renderer is the same, so you can get identical results with either exporter. But Luxus exposes more options which are simpler to adjust.
This thread is about LuxRender, not Luxus. Most of the initial posts were about Reality. The mods just don't want too much comparison going on the the Luxus promo thread itself, which should be focused on learning about that particular exporter.
Luxus is more difficult to understand than Reality at first instance, the only plus in Luxus is the "inside Daz" rendering option.
this time I'm not quoting nobody, so, this statement is only my perspective.
for faster learning curve than LuxRender, I would suggest Keyshot or Modo render engines. period.
Thanks. I took a look at Keyshot and they have some very informative videos which are interesting for understanding any rendering, I think. Just wish I could afford the software but ... well, I can't. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be designed to import human skin textures, or at least I can't find any reference to human textures.
I bought The Fabricator yesterday and the displacement issue became something of a problem for me. I tried to follow your advice here but ended up with a garment exploded to ridiculous proportions. Would you mind posting a screen shot of the settings you would use (I know you have the product because I've seen a mention of it in another thread).
Also, I have a Mac now but when I had a Windows 7 PC, I used a nice little (free) program to create Normal Maps, called SSBump Generator but it doesn't seem to be available for Mac. Does anyone know of something similar for Mac OS X (preferably free)?
It's perfect with any texture, the export settings and workflow takes just minutes, check my example below, even render time is improved, I know its expensive but it pays its price, btw, I'm NOT trying convincing anyone changing to Keyshot, but just look other render engines, I update my copy of Keyshot Pro....today, easy to use, very different of the previous version I had, version 2, the update was expensive but I love the results.
and yes, english is not my native language, is SPANISH, and I apologize for my rotten way of communication.
For my part, I'm a very hands-on person. When I got Reality my first impressions weren't greatly positive largely because I didn't understand Lux all that well, and partly because the tweaks and settings I was used to weren't there. Reality is good software, but it has a "my way or the highway" approach to materials. It does a fair job of auto converting, but has a relatively narrow field of materials that it works with.
Aside from the issue that Reality is never updated to take advantage of newer materials and instead relies on purchasing the next version (Which I'll admit left me a little sore considering its expense) it has rather strict rules on what becomes what type of material. It feels like the software is in the driving seat and you're just along for the ride. Again though, I'm very used to having all the settings at my disposal, rather than being at the mercy of what the program decides is a good choice. That said, what it does it does very well indeed. A little buggy in places, but it has served me very well indeed.
Luxus seems harder to learn, but not without reason. It's basically a front-end for Luxrender in the purest possible form. Rather than dictate how a material should behave, you have full control over every quality and setting. Don't like the fresnel? Change it! Want that medium to be a homogeneous volume? It's a few clicks away! This means that mastery of Luxus is effectively mastery over Luxrender. It gives you all the control you might require, and even has the 'extra settings' so you can manually input materials should Luxrender ever be updated to add new types.
Luxus isn't without its quirks though. Losing all of your temporary files (and thus any previous renders you've had and their corresponding FLM files) is a major pain in the butt. I think it's lovely that Luxus tries to clean up after itself (after all, I have a folder packed with about a dozen Reality renders), but it would have been nicer if some of them could be marked for the 'long haul' rather than deleted. I've taken to copying all of the renders I want to be ongoing into a separate folder to keep them from vanishing.
I'll probably never become a Luxrender expert, and I still prefer 3DL for it's simplicity, noiseless images and quickness of rendering. But the more I learn about Lux the better I become and perhaps eventually I'll get photorealistic quality images like the shiny promo's they've been showing off on their forums.
I know I shouldn't tempt myself with things I can't afford but I have downloaded the trial of Keyshot 4 just to see what results I can get. I'll try to follow your example if the trial allows me to.
No need to apologise for your English. I don't speak ANY other language so I am the one who should apologise.
I'm determined to give Luxus another chance this week. BTW, I am taking early retirement in a few weeks time so I'll have a lot more time to play :)
The problems I had that put me off:
1. Could not get the hang of lights in Luxus - Reality has the wonderfully simple Mesh lights and quite often a sinle one will do a great job.
2. Hair didn't render nicely.
3. Interiors (an enclosed room with the light inside) produced totally black renders. If I adjusted everything up to the limits (ISO film speed, f-stop, lights, etc.) I could get a few pixels but no recognisable image.
4. Otherwise, images were too harsh (and this was my impression of most of the renders posted here on the forum).
Now I've just seen a render by HellBoy in the Luxus discussion and I am very impressed. That is why I'll try again.
Again, this will depend heavily on your lighting setup and tone mapping options. By default it uses Auto-Linear tonemapping, but you can set it to Linear to have more control over exposure and shutter. As an interesting point of fact, Reality uses a very tiny shutter (0.02) by default while Luxus uses a much larger one (1.0). Clipping them to similar settings will help that a lot.
That's a lovely render. I bet the reflections were tricky?
BTW, did you use ZBrush or similar to collapse the clothing? Very nice job whatever you used.
When I try Luxus again I'll pay more attention to creating Mesh lights as you did. You are correct - I used a distant light and a couple of spots but I tried to cram them into the room. I've still no idea why they didn't illuminate anything.
Poser's cloth room was used to collapse the clothing. I exported them as OBJ files and used the results as morph targets for the daydream dress and anime panties so that I could change materials easier if I wanted to. In the latter case, the dress was placed down first as a prop for the panties to collide with so that they would sit realistically. I used another morph for the daydream shoes to get them looking unworn and discarded. Trying to move them individually wasn't getting the expected results.
Reflections were done using a mix material. Three parts mirror to seven parts textured glossy. Unfortunately the displacement doesn't seem to have shown up in the render, so it looks flatter than intended.
As to your problem, spot lights can be tricky. What appears to be 'inside' a room might actually be just outside. Check it's not clipping into the walls too much. You can move them further in and adjust the cone to fix this issue to some degree.
In general though, spotlights and distant lights are discouraged when using Luxus or Reality as they don't behave in a realistic way. In the case of distant lights, it's infinitely far and infinite in dimension -- impossible in the real world. In the case of spot lights, the light is projected at an angle, which is a way of 'faking' the way real world light spreads out and is unnecessary in Luxrender as it will do this for you anyway.
Sorry, can't help there. I use ShaderMap 2 Pro, myself, which is also Windows-only. Worst comes to worst, you could install Parallels or VMWare and run it in an virtual machine. There will probably be other Windows-only tools you'll want to use from time to time that would make that worth setting up...
Actually, I think you've summed up things very well. I guess Reality's user-friendliness goes kinda hand-in-hand with limiting the amount of complexity (and this options), so the user doesn't get overwhelmed. Still I'd prefer it to open up a bit and offer more control over materials, maybe with an optional 'advanced' interface or something. In that regards, I very much sympathize with Luxus. Another point to consider is the interface itself. People seem to be kinda divided there. I am too. I think it is nice to have the Plugin integrated with the DS interface on the one hand. On the other hand, i think DS's surface tab is an ungodly abomination, at least compared to the Reality interface that is pretty much constructed around handling surfaces. Others seem to love the DS surface tab, so I guess it's up to personal taste. In any way I do think Reality could improve it's interface still in a lot of way, particularly by offering more sorting options for materials...
Going back to the original question though, I doubt we'll see much in the way of 'Tested in LuxRender' statements. Popular or not, I doubt they are as popular as 3Delight or Firefly. People seem to like to stick with what they know. And if you train yourself to read the message 'uses procedural shaders' as 'does not work in LuxRender', I think your good as far as compatibility is concerned, no need for an extra statement :)
Render to: Still Image.
Check "Image File."
Name it.
Select "Folder," select folder.
Render away. :)
Agent understands we were just having a discussion. I am not saying Reality is the end all be all but its something I can work with that gives me better results then UE for the most part cwichura is also another great Lux artist here are some of the examples I have been able to pull off http://fav.me/d5msf0e http://fav.me/d518k6b http://fav.me/d5nkkj5 its meeting my needs. Its like HeraldOfFire says I will have to wait for R3 to access more materials but the fact Reality seems to translate 98% of the materials really well just need to adjust them.
marble I agree Hellboy's render is just sick!
Reality does have a leg up on automatic translation. I'm really looking forward to the R3 release [though the fact that Luxus is getting a node-based material editor means I'll likely stick with it for the most part].