Luxus Questions
Zenrel
Posts: 245
I just saw it on sale for 50% off and I wonder:
- What's the differences of 3Delight and this product?
- What's the pros and cons?
- Is it worth getting it?
Post edited by Zenrel on
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Luxus is a plugin for Daz Studio which allows you to use the Luxrender engine. Here's a quick comparison.
3Delight is a biased render engine. In laymans terms it basically takes a shortcut from A to D instead of going through B and C. In other words, it cheats. This cheating isn't necessarily a bad thing though, since it's very smart about how it goes about this, and discards the stuff which you don't really need anyway.
Luxrender is an unbiased render engine. It'll take you from A to D, but it goes the full route, making sure nothing is missed. The results take longer to achieve, but they can be more realistic as a result. Unbiased engines have no fixed rendering time, and the longer you leave them, the more detailed the final image will become.
The pros:
* Luxrender uses real world lighting calculations; light can flood a room from a single source unlike in 3DL.
* Luxrender uses real world materials, so they can interact with light in a believable way.
* Luxus is integrated into Daz Studio, so you can easily configure a scene to render in both 3DL and Luxus without requiring different saves.
* Luxus gives you FULL control over every aspect of the render, down to the smallest minute detail.
The cons:
* Being heavily based in 'the real world', special effects and more fantastical materials are far more difficult to create in Luxrender.
* Good lighting will require some knowledge of how to set up lamps 'for the camera' like professional photographers do.
* More difficult to learn. Luxrender has a steeper learning curve due to it's very real world physics.
* Longer render times on average. Due to it's unbiased nature, it will keep improving with each render, but to get to a stage where the 'noise' is fully removed can often take longer than the equivalent 3DL render.
Both are brilliant for different things, but if realism is your target then you should really check it out.
I just started using it (for both studio and carrara)
It's a different render engine, or more specifically: it's a plugin that allows Studio to use a different render engine (luxrender). Which basically means it renders differently (surfaces, lighting) than 3Delight. From what I heard, this engine more closely approximates real world scenarios, which makes it easier to get realistic renders.
-Pro: more realistic renders, con: can take longer to render.
There are many more things to it though, you can check out the luxrender page here:
http://www.luxrender.net/en_GB/index
Definitely worth getting IMO, specially at 50% :D
How does the DAZ product compare to Reality plugin? (Although that is $40)
I don't have Reality, though I watched some tutorial vids before Luxus came out and found it too limiting. From what i gather luxus gives you access to all the capabilities of Luxrender... and at half the price :D
EDIT: that was in the days of Reality 1, dunno if it changed much since.
Thanks. I figure at 50% off, I'll get it and add it my "get to it eventually" list. And HOF- thanks for posting the picture.
I don't want to get into too much detail, since there's a fine line between criticism and outright bashing the product, but I've found Luxus to be the more advanced of the two simply because it has the full Luxrender support.
In short, Luxus has access to every material as well as volumes. In contrast, Reality has a limited number of materials and no access to volumes aside from a simple 'fog prop' which has to be loaded in via the preset. There are literally no options to turn other objects into fog, so there's no scope for creating custom shapes. It's scaled cubes or nothing.
That said, Reality does have some useful options in the form of ACSEL shaders which is basically a community-driven online shader storage. The idea is that you can download an 'ACSEL' shader for your figures or props and it will remember to use them whenever you add those to the scene, which can save you a lot of time fiddling with materials. You can do similar tasks with Luxus by simply saving a shader preset and applying it when needed.
Reality 3 looks to be quite good though, so it might be worth picking up when it's released. It shortcuts a lot of the harder materials, such as skin, and gives full mixes and procedural options. Very powerful indeed, but as yet only available for Poser.
I don't know if anyone else have this problem, but when I put this item into the cart, it's not there. I tried add it to my cart again, but it won't let me by saying I only allow to add 1 into the cart... Re-logging didn't help.
Wow it took around 5 minutes for it to show in my cart. That was weird.
What makes me unsure if I should pick it up or not, well, oone reason that makes me unsure that is.. is if my comptuer will even be able to handle it.. so, how hard is it on the computers?
I have the 1st generation of i5, gtx 660Ti and 8gig of RAM, so I'll test it out and let your know.
It's been 30mins and it's still rendering, but it's starting to look really good.
It won't stop by itself. You need to stop Luxrender when the image is good enough for you. You can also save the current state and continue the render later.
Ciao
TD
If you can run 3DL you can run Luxrender. If anything, Lux actually uses up a bit less processing power, since it leaves your PC with a little breathing room so you can render in the background.
It won't stop by itself. You need to stop Luxrender when the image is good enough for you. You can also save the current state and continue the render later.
Ciao
TD
Thanks for that info thd. I'm just waiting for all the grain to smooth out. It still looks like a stippling painting.
LuxRender supports CPU or GPU or both, GPU tends to be faster provided you have a powerful card, CPU tends to come out slightly better, but generally a longer wait time. The more lights you use, the longer renders take but lighting is much more "natural" in setup and result. For instance if I want an outdoor scene one light is sufficient to create sunlight and behave light sunlight.
Ideally for LuxRender you need a dual core or better CPU and lots of RAM, LuxRender is a RAM hog but you have the option of a) saving your work, and using LuxRender without Studio running to maximize RAM availability, and b) linking other computers in your home to act as rendering assistants to speed things up provided they have enough RAM as well. This is all accomplished with the LuxRender interface, no other software is needed and it's free.
keep in mind you may need to adjust the settings inside LuxRender depending on the lighting of your image, if it's an "indoor" or "outdoor" exposure, if it's over exposed, underexposed or otherwise flat. LuxRender allows you to do this while you render.
for the current sale price I may pick up Luxus but from what I've seen of it's capabilities I have no regrets whatsoever on getting Reality.
Where can I find these options to tell the render if it's outside/inside/flat?
The 'Indoor' and 'Outdoor' settings are exclusive to Reality. They basically change the lighting strategy and volume settings for the render. Luxus doesn't use this, but does allow you to manually input your choice in the render settings dialog. Most of the time this shouldn't be needed though, and is recommended for more advanced users.
I see so it's best to wait until these dots or noise to filter out?
@Zenrel
Wait it out, or try to adjust the lighting in LuxRender by switching the Kernel, I find Reinhardt/Non-Linear does correct some of the "fireflies" occasionally, unless you have too many lights in your scene. less is sometimes more, you can't think in terms of 3Delight when you use LuxRender and you can always reset it what you changed in the interface of LuxRender.
I would image you have the ability to have a single light out of Luxus behave like sunlight as long as you tell Lux Render to use the Linear kernel with ISO:100, Shutter: 1/125, F-Stop 16, Gamma ~2.2 - 2.6 this is what photographers generally use for outdoor shots, you may have heard it called the Sunny 16 Rule" unless Luxus has some other method of approximating sunlight.
Get used to hours render times, but it does worth it. The results are great.
I seriously advice to turn on the LuxRender interface in the settings to acces all the options while rendering. If you render from the DAZ Studio's interface, you can't adjust anything.
It's best to adjust the materials yourself, but you'll get to that.
And try AreaLights (objects turned to light) whn youget the chance. One polygon planes are good. They provide very nice results. (The bigger the object, the softer the shadows).
I have both Reality and Luxus, but I definitelly find Luxus to be far superior.
How long you need to wait depends on how the scene is set up. A good setup can clear up after around 300 samples, maybe even less if it's not a very busy scene. I've done short animations at 100 samples p/pixel which looked fine as well.
The keys to reducing the amount of samples it requires are to have good lighting and don't overuse reflective materials. Light which bounces around too much takes considerably longer for the ray to be 'destroyed' so your PC is still calculating that single ray instead of moving onto new ones. The Metropolis sampler is pretty good at spotting some of these rogue rays, but it's still based on an unbiased system, so it won't remove all of them.
Materials to be careful with are shiny metals and glossy materials, as well as mirrors for obvious reasons. All of these materials will reflect light to a higher degree than other materials, so care needs to be taken with how much is reflected. Ensuring that glossy surfaces don't have a very high specular value is also important for good looking images. In Luxrender, even a dull grey (R: 64, G: 64, B: 64) is considered highly specular because it uses real world physics, so watch out for that.
After checking the surface tab, I saw a lot of clothing I used have 100% specular strength value and 60+% of gloss. I lowered them down to see I don't get that ultra shiny look I saw while rendering and a reduction of time to to clear the scene up.
:o
how can i enable the gpu rendering?
or have both gpu and cpu?
EDIT: how come i'm quoting myself?
check the tab marked "output" on the Reality interface and there is a section entitled "GPU Acceleration"
now I'm quoting me too...right?
:o
how can i enable the gpu rendering?
or have both gpu and cpu?
EDIT: how come i'm quoting myself?
If you're using Luxus, you'll need to select 'Hybrid' where it says Renderer in the Render settings dialog. If you're using Reality, then there's an option for using GPU acceleration in the Output tab.
Also, you're quoting yourself because you somehow deleted the forward-slash on the end of StatDragon's quote :)
Thanks :D
Now off to find out how to do it in Carrara!
It is off sale already? Was it a 1 day sale?
Seems like it. It didn't say the duration of the sale.