Luxus discussion

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  • KickAir 8PKickAir 8P Posts: 1,865
    edited December 1969

    . . . Hope that helps

    My brains are now leaking out of my ears -- is that good? :gulp: That's good, right?

    I've pulled up the saved flm (which didn't look the same as I left it, probably something else I haven't gotten to yet) and worked with the settings as you described. Still not confident (I'm no photographer), but I've got a better idea of what those controls are doing now -- thanks. I think. :sick: My thinker's thore.

  • kittenwyldekittenwylde Posts: 151
    edited December 1969

    Try this. Select Linear. Set your ISO to 1000, Shutter to 1/60, F-Stop to 8

    Is you picture to dark or to light?

    If it's to dark lower the F-Stop one level (stick with using the numbers on the pull-down menus). Each level (or 'step') you lower (decreasing the number) the F-Stop doubles the light in your scene. Increasing the F-Stop halves the light. If your lucky you'll find a F-Stop that's just perfect but more than likely you'll find one that is to dark while the next is to light.

    Then switch to the Shutter. Lowering the Shutter speed (1/60 to 1/30) increases the light hitting the camera, Increasing the speed (1/60 to 1/125) decreases the light. I don't remember the math correctly right now but step in shutter speed is less drastic than a change in F-Stop.

    If it's still not exactly what you want switch to ISO. Higher numbers mean lighter scenes, lower will give you darker. Once again each step in ISO is less harsh than a step change in Shutter Speed.

    Hope that helps

    Definitely helps. For some reason, when I have my lovely Canon 40D in hand, I can do all that stuff well. I don't even think about it consciously any more, just look at light, location, etc, and set my camera appropriately. But when it's software on my computer, not friendly little buttons on my camera, my brain starts sizzling and I forget everything I know. So thanks for putting down such clear info! That will definitely help me convert from instinctive button pushing to conscious adjustments.

  • SotoSoto Posts: 1,440
    edited April 2013

    Hellboy said:
    Settings are all out of the box, single distant light as "sun sky2" (at a rather improbable straight-shot for sunlight, hence the title), 1600x2000px , ran it almost hours 8 last night, 606.18 S/p! And it's still running, I'll see if it's improved any when I get home tonight. Pics below, for the lighter one the Kernel's set on Auto Linear, for the darker one Linear with the Estimate button hit. I combined them in GIMP with a bit more postwork, finished version in my deviantART gallery here.

    I recommend avoiding Auto Linear and Estimate Settings. Estimate Settings is good to get a base for your adjustments, especially on the first seconds/minutes of rendering, but you will get better results setting the Tone Mapping options yourself while rendering, and you wont need to combine them in GIMP later either.

    Uh-uh -- you will get better results setting the Tone Mapping options yourself while rendering. I will get lighting more suitable to anywhere from surreal alien landscapes to the pits of Hell than the doorway of an ordinary pub on a sunny morning. :red: Appreciate the thought, but I'm not there yet.

    Speaking of there, after I got home from work I stopped the render a few seconds after 18 hours, at 1.40k S/p -- no visible difference between that and what I had at at 600 S/p, and even GIMP's Difference Mode only found a faint dusting. So, that worked out well. :coolsmile:

    Don't think I know what I'm doing! After all this time using LuxRender I still limit myself to slide the dials like crazy until I find a decent combination.
    I started doing that before taking Photography, and still after that, I have no single idea what I'm doing.
    I just make it darker, brighter...
    Don't be scared, you will be glad to set the Tone Mapping yourself. It really makes a difference.

    Post edited by Soto on
  • BeaBea Posts: 745
    edited December 1969

    if you are rendering in Luxus you can always save the settings to use again :)

  • KlasKlas Posts: 18
    edited December 1969

    Hi Speric,
    while trying to build the default converted skin texture in eluxir I have noticed that the "bump_texture0" has no input. Is this correct? Tested with the Lana, Jeremy and S4 textures.

    bump.jpg
    339 x 387 - 121K
  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    Klask.

    That is a limitation/bug in Eluxir right now.

  • KlasKlas Posts: 18
    edited December 1969

    Hi Spheric,
    I have loaded Genesis in DS and startet the Luxrender. Then I looked into the lxs file to find the settings for the material. The screenshot shows a part of the lxs file, the skin texture that was generated by Luxus.

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    Actually that is correct. Subtract only takes two inputs. The equation is like this
    N + (P - N) * V

  • cwichuracwichura Posts: 1,042
    edited December 1969

    Replacing all that with a mix texture will result in faster render speed, however. Lux does all those subtract/scale/etc calculations on the fly when evaluating the texture; it doesn't bake them during scene parsing/refinement. If Luxus were to write

    Texture "bump" "float" "mix"
    "texture amount" ["bumpmapimagetexture"]
    "float tex1" [N*V]
    "float tex2" [P*V]

    (I assume V is what you are calling the bump map strength value from Studio)

    where the N*V and P*V are precomputed by Luxus and written directly into the scene file, you'd replace four texture calculations with one, which should improve render speed. It may not be a significant difference, but the more bump maps used, the more the slight savings should add up.

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    I am a big fan of not optimizing without hard data, do you have profiling information on that speedup?

  • jax_512b7aea09jax_512b7aea09 Posts: 61
    edited December 1969

    I was experimenting with creating geo-grafted items for Genesis, and having trouble with seems showing up when I render with LuxRender. (Whether I used Luxus of Reality to send the scene to LuxRender).

    The Luxus created LXS file being so much easier to read than the Reality files, I went searching for the cause. I thought there were material settings being written out differently, but couldn't find any differences there. I did find, however, that the geo-grafted item's attributes are defined twice.

    The easiest way to replicate this is by adding a genital to a Genesis figure (male or female doesn't matter). Render the scene with Luxus, close LuxRender, and open the .lxs file. All the Genesis parts are defined together, then the genital is defined again. Deleting the second occurence of the geo-grafted item gets rid of the seem lines (assuming the textures match of course).

  • cwichuracwichura Posts: 1,042
    edited April 2013

    So the duplication of geometry that Reality suffers when exporting geografts also happens in Luxus. Interesting -- it must be a Studio bug, then. I always assumed it was a bug in Reality. However, with Reality, there is a very easy workaround, since it exports all the shapes to binary plymesh files by default. Just rename all geograft items in your scene to have a unique element in the name (I append " GRAFT" to the end of all geografted items, myself). Then you can simply "del *GRAFT*.ply" in the plymesh files exported by Reality before invoking LuxRender. You'll get error messages while the scene is loaded, but it will load and render without any seam problems for the geografts.

    For more info: http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?77435-Reality-and-Geo-Grafting

    Post edited by cwichura on
  • jax_512b7aea09jax_512b7aea09 Posts: 61
    edited April 2013

    cwichura said:
    So the duplication of geometry that Reality suffers when exporting geografts also happens in Luxus. Interesting -- it must be a Studio bug, then. I always assumed it was a bug in Reality. However, with Reality, there is a very easy workaround, since it exports all the shapes to binary plymesh files by default. Just rename all geograft items in your scene to have a unique element in the name (I append " GRAFT" to the end of all geografted items, myself). Then you can simply "del *GRAFT*.ply" in the plymesh files exported by Reality before invoking LuxRender. You'll get error messages while the scene is loaded, but it will load and render without any seam problems for the geografts.

    For more info: http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?77435-Reality-and-Geo-Grafting


    Thanks for that workaround for Reality. I like to use both, and was going to spend who knows how many hours figuring that out :)

    Deleting the duplicate lines from the Luxus .lxs file has the added bonus of not throwing errors when LuxRender parses the file :)

    Post edited by jax_512b7aea09 on
  • cwichuracwichura Posts: 1,042
    edited April 2013

    Agreed it's cleaner to edit the files, and I do that for my own stuff. Adding "GRAFT" to the end of names works just as well for doing searches within the .lxo file as it does for deleting the plymesh files. But for folks that aren't comfortable doing that (and there are a lot of folks scared of the LuxRender scene file syntax, since they're artists -- not technologists), the deletion trick is an easy way for them to get geografts working.

    Post edited by cwichura on
  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    The double graft problem will be fixed in next build.

  • jax_512b7aea09jax_512b7aea09 Posts: 61
    edited December 1969

    The double graft problem will be fixed in next build.

    You rock. :coolsmile:
  • kittenwyldekittenwylde Posts: 151
    edited December 1969

    Mordur said:
    The double graft problem will be fixed in next build.

    You rock. :coolsmile:
    I second that opinion. :)
  • glaseyeglaseye Posts: 1,311
    edited December 1969

    And another tryout with Luxus and some tweaking in Luxrender

    A 'simple' setup with 3 meshlights, 2 low intensity 'softboxes' on the left (one a little front,the other back) and one strong key light on the right-back with it's black body temp set all the way down to 1000. Also used the Kodak Portra 400NC film response setting..

    Dora_400NC-Luxrender.jpg
    800 x 1200 - 354K
  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    nice one glaseye2. The light interaction with the bangs is cool.

  • Michael GMichael G Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Victoria 4
    Forest princess hair
    Battle maiden, Knights templar texture set
    Legend of the stone keeper
    Kodak portra 800 film response
    Small amount of bloom

    Rendered to 3k samples with LUXrender v1.3 beta using LUXUS.

    The armour has custom made normal maps for the embossing and is LUX metal 2 with a gold freshnal file.

    Warrior_elf.jpg
    1131 x 1600 - 313K
  • KibbyKibby Posts: 60
    edited December 1969

    I'm struggling with sky light set up. I tried "Luxus Sun & Day" and "Luxus Sun & Dusk".

    in LuxRender's Lights tab during the rendering, I turned off light for sun then dragged a slider for sky2 all the way to zero which would make render appearing black. I slowly incremented the slider for sky2. I noticed middle of scene would lit up first rather than the entire scene.

    To my understanding, it could be a script error in Luxus? They used point light for sky2? What did Reality 2.5 use -- cause they actually lit up the scene equally.

    Any solution or better method would be appreciated. :) Will Luxus release a correction for the sky part?

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    I'm struggling with sky light set up. I tried "Luxus Sun & Day" and "Luxus Sun & Dusk".

    in LuxRender's Lights tab during the rendering, I turned off light for sun then dragged a slider for sky2 all the way to zero which would make render appearing black. I slowly incremented the slider for sky2. I noticed middle of scene would lit up first rather than the entire scene.

    To my understanding, it could be a script error in Luxus? They used point light for sky2? What did Reality 2.5 use -- cause they actually lit up the scene equally.

    Any solution or better method would be appreciated. :) Will Luxus release a correction for the sky part?

    I've double checked, the Sky is correct.

    "Sun & Sky2 Daylight" will show up as "Sun & Sky2" in the LuxRender Lights Tab. So If you have two light groups in the LuxRender Lights Tab, then you must have and additional light besides the Luxus "Sun & Sky2 Daylight"

    If you aim the camera, such that you can see past any object in the scene, do you see sky color or blackness? The Sky2 will provide a sky looking color for anywhere that does not have an object in front of it.

    Or do you have some sort of background object that is blocking the sky?

  • edited December 1969

    Finally Created a picture in Luxus I am happy with

    Masquerade_Agfachrome_CtPrecisia_200.jpg
    1000 x 707 - 446K
  • KhoryKhory Posts: 3,854
    edited December 1969

    That is an amazing image!

  • edited December 1969

    Khory said:
    That is an amazing image!

    agreed

  • MelanieLMelanieL Posts: 7,373
    edited December 1969

    Absolutely thirded - that is one superb image, Sprinkles! Gives me a spur to get cracking with Luxus - I bought it late in MM but haven't installed it yet as I have so much else to play with! :)

  • nDelphinDelphi Posts: 1,861
    edited December 1969

    Sprinkles said:
    Finally Created a picture in Luxus I am happy with

    That is a beautiful photo-realistic image. Great job. Even the feathers look so real.

  • SloshSlosh Posts: 2,391
    edited December 1969

    Beautiful, Sprinkles. I swear, I am going to have to devote a week or so to playing with Luxus. I have done, a little, but not overly thrilled with my results. If/when I come up with a great skin shader, hair shader, whatever, I am going to start a new thread to post my settings and hopefully others will contribute their settings as well.

  • StormlyghtStormlyght Posts: 666
    edited December 1969

    Sprinkles said:
    Finally Created a picture in Luxus I am happy with

    @Sprinkles I love your render!

    I just finished watching the Luxus Training videos by Bluebird 3D (very helpful) so perhaps I will get something that I'm happier with too :)

  • jax_512b7aea09jax_512b7aea09 Posts: 61
    edited December 1969

    Sprinkles said:
    Finally Created a picture in Luxus I am happy with

    Very nice. That's beyond what I can do, but I just started - I'll get there :)

    Did you do any post work on this image?

This discussion has been closed.