Luxus discussion
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There's a lot of work which needs to go into creating materials for Reality's ACSEL and they're distributed freely via an uncontrolled service. In contrast, Luxus allows you to create material presets within Daz Studio itself and either distribute them with the product or create shader packs to sell in addition to the main product. In terms of which is offers ease of use and flexibility for material presets, Luxus has the upper hand in this one.
I'll admit though, I too was disappointed by the lack of good ACSEL shaders for many products. I will say though that being able to save a material preset for later use is far easier to do in Luxus than Reality, which also makes it handy for the end user. That said, I'm always going to find areas which Luxus is weaker at or stronger at than Reality and vice versa. Having access to all of the materials has left me experimenting more than actually making artworks, trying to find the best way to get the results I want.
Herald... this is perfectly said! At the moment, to me, Reality is much more user friendly, however, if the PAs do add Luxus mat settings to their products, will make Luxus as easy as it gets. Reality is more mature... out of the box and requires less learning. Paolo simply got a lot of things right with the product. Also, of interest, Reality comes with more lights and other things. It will be interesting to see if these come as pay for add-ons to Luxus or if they will be included in an upgrade. It doesn't seem to have a softbox nor gobo lights for instance. The Reality softbox is awesome! So, the price point could become a mute point if you will need to pay for these other items. IOW, it could easily equal out or even go higher.
A few of the LuxRender basic Render settings IMO are a bit off with Luxus. As stated in post above, setting Gamma to 2.20 in Luxus improves at least some things. Reality is set to this out of the box. A PA can adjust material settings, but cannot adjust the default render settings under the Render tab. So, PA's would likely be best off to leave those setting as defaults in spite of them perhaps making the render look not as good?
Luxus has taken me on a learning path for sure! I know more about LuxRender after today than I did in total up until today. Reality took away the need for me to know a lot of this. So, is that a good thing? Well to me it forced me to get around to it. I doubt most users will want to dive in that deep. And, there is sooooo much to LuxRender that I do wonder how much of what I learned today will be forgotten in the next month or so? Use it or lose it. LuxRender is one extremely powerful 'command line' tool. Overlaying a GUI to issue those commands is no easy task. The folks at Luxus have done a wonderful job and it is obvious put huge amounts of work into this.
Well, did somebody try to save Render presets?
It is possible for DS render presets ( http://www.sharecg.com/v/57250/View/8/Script/DAZ-Studio-4-Render-Presets ), it should be possible for Luxus render presets too.
I am not at my render pc at the moment ...
You can get renders that are done in under 1000S/p, but it depends a lot on scene construction, and they almost always are lit by a single IBL. Which brings me to the other point I forgot to mention: Not only does Lux prefer HDRs for environment lights, but you will get significantly better render performance if you load them as an infinite light rather than as an area light, such as your ring is. When you use an area light, internally Lux basically treats each face in the mesh as a separate light. The more faces in the mesh, the slower it will render. If you are going to create separate HDR resources for use in Lux, you'd be best off using one of the projection mappings that Lux supports so they can be loaded as an IBL, which counts as only a single light internally and thus renders much faster. See http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/Environment_map for details on the projections supported.
ok this looks alot better, I changed the scattering to a lighter reddish color from the orangish color
volume scattering color is 250 142 127 when the previous color was 250 100 20
9 hours 4.86 kS/p
I found more information on Transmaps and LuxRender:
http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?76960-How-To-Fix-quot-Plastic-Helmet-Hair-quot
Ok dokey time to pick brains if you have the time.
This rendered until 2K s/p was reached...for me that was 16 hours. :) Not bad for a first attempt but not as clear as I hoped. Is this just down to more rendering time, higher S/p rate or something else. The scene is lit by a HDRI using Infinite Light setting in Daz Studio and one Area plane light. I even thought It may be down to the camera settings in Daz Studio. Here are the render settings I used. All the rest at defualts. Left all the gamma settings at defualt too.
I am just unsure of myself at this pint hence me asking and if I could turn around tests renders quicker I probably wouldn't be asking at all.
Sampler:
Hybrid
Metropolis (pixel samples 8)
Pixel Sample:
Hibert
Tone Mapping Kern:
Linear
Surface Integrator:
Path
I am testing the Random sampler as I type this and won't know until much later if that makes any difference.
Any help would be a godsend at this point. :)
I think it's your bump map intensity setting. Like everything else in Lux it works in a scale of meters, so you probably want it set around 0.0005 to 0.002 (0.5mm to 2mm maximum notional bump size) with a standard bump map.
Is the tablet surface reflective?
Change Texture Gamma to 2.2
-> Change Gamma to 2.2
-> leave Tone Linear Gamma at 1.0
-> Render.
So the Tone Linear Gamma should be 2.2 also?
Here is a bigger version of that badge that I made so you can see it
Set all three Gamma values to 2.2 is correct. Leaving all of them 1.0 and then adjust light groups will also work.
Now that I understand it better. The 2.2 route will light more correctly. As Luxus currently stands(1.0.0.3) the 1.0 route arguably the colors are more correct.
An update will address these issues such that lighting and colors are all correct by getting all the colors passed into LuxRender into linear space.
Set all three Gamma values to 2.2 is correct. Leaving all of them 1.0 and then adjust light groups will also work.
Now that I understand it better. The 2.2 route will light more correctly. As Luxus currently stands(1.0.0.3) the 1.0 route arguably the colors are more correct.
An update will address these issues such that lighting and colors are all correct by getting all the colors passed into LuxRender into linear space.
hmm ok I'm not setting the tone linear gamma, I'll have to try that, I've been leaving the lights alone and just tweaking the camera settings in linear tone mapping (in the Lux GUI)
I think it's your bump map intensity setting. Like everything else in Lux it works in a scale of meters, so you probably want it set around 0.0005 to 0.002 (0.5mm to 2mm maximum notional bump size) with a standard bump map.Cheers for that. Never thooght of check the bump setting. Cool I will go and fiddle with that now. Thank you.
OK, if I am wrong somebody tell me ...
As far as I know you can compare LuxRender to Progressive Rendering in DazStudio - the overall pictures gets better and better and better with each pass.
Just that LuxRender, contrary to DS, never stops.
Now each ray that does your reflections has to be computed more often than for example for a nonreflective material.
It needs more passes to get the whole picture clearer.
(I really hope I got that right)
right the more reflections, caustics, volumetrics you have the more samples per pixel it takes to clear up.
Oh wow, I DID get something right! :)
However I never thought about reflections and how much extra rednering it needs. Thank you I am starting to see the full picture.
And yes my bumps maps were way to high, half a meter too high LOL. Ok Daz Studio CM and Lux in Meters..check. I am so glad I asked now thank you. I will see how this one turns out.
Well - even with biased render engines raytraced reflections are taking time.
That's why I usually have my render settings (DS and Poser) set to 2 rays - and only go higher with something like mirrors in the scene.
ok this is after an hour, around 1K S/p
single cube mesh light, the floor is the white matte material, the walls (which are out of frame are glossy white)
the diamond is Glass2 with homogenous volume IOR 2.5 or something I think. and dispersion on...
Nice!
Beautiful!
*wants a real diamond now*
;)
in case anyone wants to play with settings
I got the gem here http://www.3dlapidary.com/Index.htm
But thanks for making me aware that I do need to take reflections in to consideration too. :)
Rareth..nice...no very nice indeed.
Here is a shader preset that should do Rareth's diamond
-> http://sphericlabs.com/scratch/Glass2Diamond.zip
Hmmm... interesting. I wonder just what it is doing? But even if you could/can reset a user's settings under the 'Render' tab, I wouldn't want to do this with a product (except for a product specifically advertised to do this). If that was started with basic content, there would be constant fights between artist setting them to what they think is best. Conflicts would arise as a scene only gets to work from one setup in this area. I think PAs should rely only on what is available to them within the 'Surfaces' area.
render presets are not working, but this is an oversight that will be corrected.
If the Mesh is using a custom shader, then the auto translate is likely to get it pretty wrong. StoneMason's snow does the same thing.
Makes sense. Do you have written up anywhere the steps I should take to manually correct a custom shader that auto-translate can't figure out?
Makes sense. Do you have written up anywhere the steps I should take to manually correct a custom shader that auto-translate can't figure out?
I don't but that is a good idea. I will get on that.
if its a shader from the shader mixer (or shader builder) they are RiSpec shaders for 3Delight renderer they're not going to translate properly (if at all) to Luxrender, DAZ's wood shader doesn't translate at all.
The Eluxir plugin (in beta) will help with this, as it adds shader mixer functionality for making Lux materials, but imho it has a ways to go.
Wood shaders work fine for me I used them on the table in this set http://fav.me/d4ym7wp
Nice job on the diamond