Luxrender: Reality or Luxus

gibrril_fa945a6cee

Hi,

If I want to start rendering in Luxrender from DS, what is the best choice: Luxus or Reality?

If possible I would like to be able to batch render.... And obviously get as photoreal as possible.

I have a build with 128 GB of Ram, an i7 ten core CPU and a dual GTX TITAN (12 GB each) in case system specs matter to make a chouce here...

Thanks a lot for the feedback,

Me

 

greymouser69

I have used reality a great deal, in fact I bought it over at rendo before Paolo came to daz.  I do own luxus as well since I picked it up on a major sale for cheap but I haven't used it yet.  One thing I have discovered recently, reality does not play well with things installed via connect in fact I uninstalled everything I had in connect and switched to DIM for that very reason.  With connect reality can't seem to find textures & such.

Mattymanx

Luxus is very well integrated in to Daz Studio, kinda like Iray is.  Reality however, is easier to use.

gibrril_fa945a6cee

Thanks!

Is there any difference in the output? I mean, do both products offer the same amount of control over surfaces and textures? Both convert to Luxrender, so I'm assuming the render quality and time is the same for both?

 

Thanks a lot,

Me

kyoto kid

...never used Luxus though did use Reality (2.0. & 2.5) and it allows you to close the scene and even Daz programne after submitting the file to LuxRender saving system resources. The one downside, it is glacially slow in CPU mode. Also you need an AMD GPU card for GPU rendering as Lux does not support CUDA. Reality in a way is like using the standalone RIB 3DL render engine, so I would imagine it could be run on a networked render system.

Nyghtfall3D

gibrril_fa945a6cee said:

Is there any difference in the output? I mean, do both products offer the same amount of control over surfaces and textures? Both convert to Luxrender, so I'm assuming the render quality and time is the same for both?

Luxus and Reality are bridges to LuxRender, and have no bearing on render quality.  What matters is the shader and lighting info they send to LuxRender, and how LuxRender intreprets that info.

As for the core differences between Luxus and Reality, my understanding is that Luxus was an ongoing, open-source project that never quite solidified into a truly practical option for rendering with LuxRender.  Reality solved that problem with a much more intuitive interface and better shader conversion for LuxRender, and quickly became part of the standard pipline for artists specializing in PBR.  If were to go back in time and choose between Luxus and Reality, I would choose Reality again, hands down.

Richard Haseltine

kyoto kid said:

...never used Luxus though did use Reality (2.0. & 2.5) and it allows you to close the scene and even Daz programne after submitting the file to LuxRender saving system resources. The one downside, it is glacially slow in CPU mode. Also you need an AMD GPU card for GPU rendering as Lux does not support CUDA. Reality in a way is like using the standalone RIB 3DL render engine, so I would imagine it could be run on a networked render system.

nVidia cards do support OpenCL, though I am told less well than AMD cards. Still, you should certainly see soem benfit from an nVidia GPU comapred to CPU-only.

greymouser69

To the best of my recollection reality was the first plugin available for luxrender and it is available for DS and Poser.  Luxus is not open source, it is sold here at Daz and is available for DS and Carrara.  Luxrender is open source and supports OpenCL as Richard said so any advanced graphics display should support OpenCL to some degree.

As for rendering, materials need to be tweaked since lux is PBR and DS or Iray "shaders" won't translate but otherwise both plugins call the same render engine so the only difference will be surface settings.  One of the coolest features of lux over Iray is the film response settings so you can simulate kodachrome or ectakrome etc. film stock.

As to batch rendering, luxrender does support batch renders with specific stop conditions but that needs to be set up manually.  Also it is very easy to set up network render nodes so more than one computer can contribute to renders without paying outrageous licenses.  So you can have lux running in the background on your wife's computer and set it as a network node on your main computer without needing to have DS or anything other than lux installed on your wife's computer since lux will transfer everything needed for it to contribute.

gibrril_fa945a6cee

I see,thanks for the rplies!

Are there any tutorials on batch rendering in Luxrender?

Talking about tutorials, are there any that cover shader conversion? (eg, do you use Iray or 3DL materials to start from?)

Concerning the GPU's this is what I picked up from the Luxrender site:

"For GPU acceleration, only AMD (ATI) and NVIDIA GPUs are supported. Integrated graphics chips such as those from Intel are not supported. Up-to-date drivers with OpenCL support is required.

AMD / ATI

Radeon 5xxx or greater. Best results can be achieved with an HD 57xx or HD 58xx.

NVIDIA

GeForce 8xxx or greater. Good results can be achieved with a GTX 2xx, better still with a GTX 4xx."

I guess I'm quite covered then with my two Titan X cards, no? (I don't know what the reference 2xx or 4xx means in relation to a Titan X)

 

Thanks a lot,

Me

gibrril_fa945a6cee

Other question :)

Iray allows me to uncheck the CPU as an available asset to process the render, which means I can do other CPU intensive stuff while my GPU's take care of the render. Does Luxrender alloww for something similar? (and is it wise to use that option? I mean, when using Iray, GPU rendering is a lot faster than CPU rendering, but does that apply to Luxrender as well?)

 

Thanks again,

Me

Jim_1831252

I've written a fair bit about both reality and luxus. My personal choice is luxus. It is more flexible and better integrated into the Studio layout. Beginners guide for luxus http://www.digisprawl.com/blog/tutorials/ Reality review http://www.digisprawl.com/blog/review/reality-4-1-review/ Unfortunately i don't have any experience batch rendering, so can't help you there. I do wonder why you are interested in lux over iray though. You've got the goods for working with kt.

Jim_1831252

Oh, and yes, lux will allow you to use either gpu or cpu. When I was last using luxrender the gpu version was not up to the quality of CPU rendering. That may have changed.

kyoto kid

Richard Haseltine said:

kyoto kid said:

...never used Luxus though did use Reality (2.0. & 2.5) and it allows you to close the scene and even Daz programne after submitting the file to LuxRender saving system resources. The one downside, it is glacially slow in CPU mode. Also you need an AMD GPU card for GPU rendering as Lux does not support CUDA. Reality in a way is like using the standalone RIB 3DL render engine, so I would imagine it could be run on a networked render system.

nVidia cards do support OpenCL, though I am told less well than AMD cards. Still, you should certainly see soem benfit from an nVidia GPU comapred to CPU-only.

..Nvidia openCL develoment is far behind AMD.

kyoto kid

gibrril_fa945a6cee said:

Other question :)

Iray allows me to uncheck the CPU as an available asset to process the render, which means I can do other CPU intensive stuff while my GPU's take care of the render. Does Luxrender alloww for something similar? (and is it wise to use that option? I mean, when using Iray, GPU rendering is a lot faster than CPU rendering, but does that apply to Luxrender as well?)

 

Thanks again,

Me

...yes but Iray requires the scene and Daz programme to remain open which if you are doing CPU rendering saps a major amount of system resources. I often have the process dump to swap mode due to the fact that scene file and Dazprogramme neds to remain open which consumes a good deal of system memory by itself.

gederix

Reality 4+ is significantly faster than 2.x with the new accelerated mode, and you can render with your gpu, cpu or both, with open gl, or not..

To batch render in luxrender you export your renders from daz, then open luxrender, go to the queue tab and load the renders, and set your halt condition (for ex, 5,000 samples/pixel). Very simple. Also very easy to stop and restart renders. Or pause them.

As far as realism goes theres a reality gallery over at deviantart worth a look: http://reality-plug-in.deviantart.com/

 

 

gibrril_fa945a6cee

Jim said:

I've written a fair bit about both reality and luxus. My personal choice is luxus. It is more flexible and better integrated into the Studio layout. Beginners guide for luxus http://www.digisprawl.com/blog/tutorials/ Reality review http://www.digisprawl.com/blog/review/reality-4-1-review/ Unfortunately i don't have any experience batch rendering, so can't help you there. I do wonder why you are interested in lux over iray though. You've got the goods for working with kt.

Thanks for the replies!

I'm curius, what does kt mean in the quote above?

I'm thinking on lux, because way back when, when reality was still in its 2.X phase, I bought reality, and I still think Luxrenders from back then look better then Iray renders from today.

 

Bobvan

Thats the thing I miss from lux specially with the new rig is the ablitiy to batch render while away..

Jim_1831252

Heh kt is a typo of it. I was on my tablet and k often accidently replaces I when I use the touch screen.

Good luck with your LuxRenders! It is a great engine.I still much prefer Luxus to Reality though.

gibrril_fa945a6cee

Thanks a lot for clearing up the typo and the replies!

So batch rendering is possible, once you have a set of converted daz scenes that can be loaded into Luxrender using the queu, or can you batch straight from Daz .duf files?

Thanks a lot again,

Me

Takeo.Kensei

kyoto kid said:

Richard Haseltine said:

kyoto kid said:

...never used Luxus though did use Reality (2.0. & 2.5) and it allows you to close the scene and even Daz programne after submitting the file to LuxRender saving system resources. The one downside, it is glacially slow in CPU mode. Also you need an AMD GPU card for GPU rendering as Lux does not support CUDA. Reality in a way is like using the standalone RIB 3DL render engine, so I would imagine it could be run on a networked render system.

nVidia cards do support OpenCL, though I am told less well than AMD cards. Still, you should certainly see soem benfit from an nVidia GPU comapred to CPU-only.

..Nvidia openCL develoment is far behind AMD.

No, Nvidia was never behind in term of development. Nvidia used to cripple OPENCL performance but that is not more true since Maxwell. As for the API they still are on OPENCL 1.2 but that doesn't prevent the use of Luxrender or any OPENCL based application. As I didn"t see any renderer that use a newer API, NVIDIA really doesn't need to work on that

Any Nvidia Maxwell or Pascal card should have good performance with Luxrender. The Titan should be able to get 5-6 Msamples/s in complex scenes

The dual Titan should scale pretty well and get 10-12 Msamples/s in complex scenes.

Whatever plugin you choose, Luxrender is a good engine and has some advantages and also drawbacks VS Iray. It doesn't render better. The quality of the renders depends on the guy between the chair and the keyboard

 

Soto

Luxus is fully integrated inside DAZ Studio, it has much more options with a higher learning curve.

Reality works outside of DAZ Studio and tries to be as quick and simple as possible at the cost of flexibility.

Both will give you great results, but Luxus is more professional. I think Iray is the best unbiassed option, but if you want to use Luxrender, I`d go with Luxus for sure.

AJ2112

I truly enjoyed using Reality/lux, reality interface was very easy to learn and use, I learned majority of what I know now via Reality, specially materials/lighting.  Reality/lux have fantastic guides/documentation, to me that was a major plus.  DS Iray is awesome to, but lack learning materials, makes learning the engine very challenging.  That's what seperates the two engines in my opinion.         

Jim_1831252

That's a pretty interesting benchmark comparison. I hadn't seen the new nvidia cards on LuxRender. Thanks Takeo ^_^

100% what Hellboy says.

gibrril_fa945a6cee

Thanks again for the replies!

Does rendering with Luxrender driven by GPU also mean (like Iray) that the entire scene has to fit on the memory of one GPU? Or does that benchmark only go for Iray? How complex can I make my scenes and still have a reasonalble render quality and time? (7 Genesis 3 figures and a complex environment for example?)

Thanks a lot,

Me

kyoto kid

gederix said:

Reality 4+ is significantly faster than 2.x with the new accelerated mode, and you can render with your gpu, cpu or both, with open gl, or not..

To batch render in luxrender you export your renders from daz, then open luxrender, go to the queue tab and load the renders, and set your halt condition (for ex, 5,000 samples/pixel). Very simple. Also very easy to stop and restart renders. Or pause them.

As far as realism goes theres a reality gallery over at deviantart worth a look: http://reality-plug-in.deviantart.com/

 

 

...I found 4.x to be very buggy.  it would not remember which was my rendering camera (somtimes not even list it) and each time there was a new patch I had to set up all my materials in scenes I was working on all over again.  Finally uninstalled it out of frustration.

I also have a first generation i7 so it doesn't benefit from the full x 10 speed boost as later i7s provide (more like x 3 at best for me so a 72 hour render becomes a 24 - 30 hour render, not enough of an advantage).  Iray even in CPU mode is quicker.

gederix

I had issues with pre-4.x scenes and camera weirdness but fixed them by saving the scene as a subset to wipe reality data, then redoing any mats etc that I hadnt saved as auto presets, but I do not have the camera issue with anything Ive buillt post 4.x. Nor any patch erasing mat settings, havent experienced that one (as far as I know anyway). I am far far happier with 4.x than 2.x, just faster, more stable, and now we can copy/paste texture channels and edit multiple surfaces at once, so overall setup is a lot easier/faster than it used to be imho. Currently eagerly awaiting upcoming improvements to luxcore as I use that more than luxrender classic now since its so much faster.

 

Jim_1831252

I'd just grown those hairs back.... the horrors of those bugs. I remember luxus would sometimes loose texture information too.

Takeo.Kensei

Jim said:

That's a pretty interesting benchmark comparison. I hadn't seen the new nvidia cards on LuxRender. Thanks Takeo ^_^

100% what Hellboy says.

You're welcome :)

 

gibrril_fa945a6cee said:

Thanks again for the replies!

Does rendering with Luxrender driven by GPU also mean (like Iray) that the entire scene has to fit on the memory of one GPU? Or does that benchmark only go for Iray? How complex can I make my scenes and still have a reasonalble render quality and time? (7 Genesis 3 figures and a complex environment for example?)

Thanks a lot,

Me

Same memory requirement for both engine. And Luxrender doesn't switch to CPU render when there is not enough memory. I don't know what would take your scenes in memory, but I'd say that the major part will be taken by textures. with Iray, you have a compression system. I don't recall anything like that for Luxrender, so you'll have to reduce your texture yourself or with the help of an utility that is sold on DS Store (don't recall the name, but I think it's something like Texture Optimizer)

For the render time, I don't know what's available with Reality and Luxus (I use blender) and there are different "engine" available with Luxrender (aka biased Path and Bidir VCM ) that could render quicker than the traditionnal bidir path tracer. See http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxBlend25_LuxCore

The right choice for the Sampler can also help

 

kyoto kid

...that is not good if it just crashes.  At least with Iray you have something for your troubles.

Bobvan

I am curious has P stopped working on Reality?

Edit. I went and asked what was new on their forum..

brainmuffin

I'll put my answer this way. Paolo (creater of Reality) complaining that OpenCL didn't work on the Mac in a blog post was so well received, it got Apple's attention, they contacted him, and fixed the issues.