Luxus discussion
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Hmmmmmm - but there are human renders with less mascara effect ...
This one has about the same distance as my A3 render: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/18543/P330/#275052
This is Genesis, not A3: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/18543/P330/#274957
Genesis again, at about the same distance as my A3 - this time V5 (no heavy mascara): http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/18543/P480/#276501
So it doesn't seem to be a general lashes problem.
Are you by any chance rendering in hybrid mode ?
If so, make sure your sampler is set to 'random' and the surface integrator to 'path'.
the wood ball is just this pasted into the Lux render extra settings field in the shader.
# BEGIN DB Material 'wood (abura)' ID 68
# Author pandrzej2, Sun, 26 Jun 11 14:17:15 -0700
# Version 0.9.0.dev ; Rated 0 / 5.0 ; 0 Votes
# interior :
# exterior : world
# previewsamples : 832
# DB Object ID 307
MakeNamedVolume "world" "clear"
# ParamSet ID 196
"float fresnel" [1.0002770423889]
"color absorption" [0 0 0]
# DB Object ID 308
Texture "wood.noise2" "float" "blender_distortednoise"
# ParamSet ID 197
"float bright" [1]
"float contrast" [4.5]
"string type" ["blender_original"]
"string noisebasis" ["cell_noise"]
"float distamount" [1]
"float noisesize" [0.5019873380661]
"float nabla" [0.025000000372529]
"string coordinates" ["global"]
"vector translate" [0 0 0]
"vector rotate" [0 0 0]
"vector scale" [0.0099999997764826 0.10000000149012 0.10000000149012]
# DB Object ID 309
Texture "wood.noise1" "float" "blender_clouds"
# ParamSet ID 198
"float bright" [1]
"float contrast" [4.5]
"string noisetype" ["hard_noise"]
"string noisebasis" ["voronoi_f2"]
"float noisesize" [0.019999999552965]
"integer noisedepth" [2]
"string coordinates" ["global"]
"vector translate" [0 0 0]
"vector rotate" [0 0 0]
"vector scale" [0.0049999998882413 1 1]
# DB Object ID 310
Texture "wood.mix" "float" "multimix"
# ParamSet ID 199
"texture tex1" ["wood.noise2"]
"texture tex2" ["wood.noise1"]
"float weights" [0.59999990463257 0.90000021457672]
# DB Object ID 311
Texture "wood.mix_scaled_1" "float" "scale"
# ParamSet ID 200
"float tex1" [-0.0010000000474975]
"texture tex2" ["wood.mix"]
# DB Object ID 312
Texture "wood.color" "color" "mix"
# ParamSet ID 201
"texture amount" ["wood.mix"]
"color tex1" [0.61516600847244 0.21975502371788 0.044444445520639]
"color tex2" [0.26675423979759 0.093863278627396 0]
# DB Object ID 313
MakeNamedMaterial "wood (abura)"
# ParamSet ID 202
"texture bumpmap" ["wood.mix_scaled_1"]
"bool multibounce" ["false"]
"texture Kd" ["wood.color"]
"float index" [2.4571011066437]
"color Ks" [1 1 1]
"float uroughness" [0.079999998211861]
"float vroughness" [0.079999998211861]
"string type" ["glossy"]
# END DB Material 'wood (abura)' ID 68
NamedMaterial "wood (abura)"
the rest all came with Luxus, bolded is the lined added to the lxm file I got from the materials database at the Luxrender wiki
the glowy thing is the luxball stand with Light added to the lux material (its a tic box)
Thanks Rareth very cool. So you wrote this out yourself? Or did you dig it out and then add to it. This is one aspect I shy away from to be honest.
1) Download the LXM file for the material you want to add.
2) Open the file in a text editor like Notepad and look for the line beginning 'MakeNamedMaterial'
3) At the end of the text add the line 'NamedMaterial "material_name"' where material_name is the material named listed under "MakeNamedMaterial"
4) Copy the entire material including the line you added.
5) Paste it into the Luxrender Extra Settings option in Daz Studio.
6) Render
Oops I saw that yesterday..may bad. Thanks Rareth. Well I think it is time I dabbled with this then, what's the worse that could happen. :)
I've found a few pitfalls in using Luxus lately.
1) Using the Metal2 material means you MUST use a fresnel file or a preset. The only way around this is to manually edit the material settings to create your own fresnel. Most exporters have the option to export custom fresnel textures by simply setting a colour for the metal, so this would be a useful function to add. The 'shinymetal' material allows you to do this just fine though.
2) With the Luxball scene earlier I found the floor texture was oddly flipped both horizontally and vertically. I had set it to a matte texture, but no other edits were made.
Mostly I was interested in how Reality and Luxus would play off with similar settings, so my plan was to create two metallic green Luxballs and have a render-off, but manually editing the file to add the same colour settings as Reality would have been a bit of a cheat way to do it. I did end up doing a version using shiny metal, but as I'm sure you can guess, the results differed far more than they would have using Metal2.
Are there plans to allow Luxus to export fresnel colour settings, or perhaps a way to manually create a fresnel file using the extra settings that it will actually be able to use? Former preferred, but I'll take what I can get :)
cool luxball.
We could add the metal material back, but it was depracated. I will look into it.
Have you looked at Eluxir
-> http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/18555/P30/
Had quite some trouble myself with hybrid mode, been doing some testing and spitting through the forums at luxrender. According to what i read, in hybrid mode the metropolis sampler is not recommended (something with creating too many samples, i believe), and bidirectional should plainly not be used for anything other than testing purposes.
It's really just stuff i read, i'm still far from being an experienced lexrenderer but sticking to these two rules have given me good results in hybrid mode and no more crashing of the videodriver...
Still gonna do some experimenting with these settings though, knowing what doesn't work for me is just not as good as knowing why it doesn't. ;-)
Reality and Luxus pros and cons.
Well, I've been at it all day working on a glass carafe. :) Reality lets me ever so easily choose a particular glass type... like 29% Lead. That is what I was after. Less than 1 minute and I've got it. Luxus, well, I'm still tweaking. I compared lxs and lxm files... tweaked, rendered, tweaked, rendered, tweaked, rendered. I'm still not getting exactly the results I want, but I am extremely close! Most of the day at this. Pro for Reality being much easier to select and apply various materials such as chrome, metals, blah blah blah and all the needed settings for that material being right there in your face. Con for Luxux as you need to know more about Luxrender commands. TMI.
But!!!! I can get this set and save my carafe and give it to someone else running 3Delight or Luxus and they get the same results that I do! That is a big pro. And, I suppose once I figure out the umpty-eleven hundred sliders, maybe I'll find that some of those are ones I would like to have in Reality. (If they are there, I don't see them... but one can always edit the lxm file). Pro to Luxus.
As for which one is easier? Well, Luxus does pretty good with the materials right out of the box, but for that matter, Reality does pretty good with the materials right out of the box. I'm thinking they are pretty even in this department. Reality does have the overlay/pop-up which doesn't allow you to keep tweaking until you close it. Not really a big deal. Reality's interface does seem to be easier to navigate. Everything in use it right there in the one interface. So, for speed, I'm not sure I'll ever be as fast with Luxus. For tweaks? If I ever learn about and remember all of these settings, Luxus seems that it has more available to tune. But, Reality has so many things pre-tuned so that more work rarely needs to be done... IMO.
I do have an idea that the PAs will start adding the Luxus materials in their products. For this reason, having Luxus might almost become required. I have only been into this world again for about a year (was a looooooonnnnng time ago I played with it). In that year, I have been amazed by how the quality has risen. I'm saying this based on the renders I see in these forums and by the new products (for the most part) being so much better than just one year ago. So, within another year, it might be that only a better render will look right in many cases. Yes, 3Delight does a nice job on a lot of things.... but 3Delight cannot do justice to things like leaded glass. Once products have those Luxus mats built in, it will be just too nice to have Luxus to easily produce great renders and the PAs will need to get the mats right.
Given what I know right now, I'm really happy to have both Reality and Luxus and would buy them both again if I had neither. Differences in programs that do pretty much the same task make one better for some things and the other better for other things. This is very true with Luxus and Reality.
I never did get Reality so the old saying goes I won't miss what I never had. I do think that this plug-in is in it's early stage of developement. I am going by what SphericLabs said about adding all sorts of things they have planned. I have a very low spec machine and I am having a blast in DS4.5 with no crashes at render time like I do using 3Delight. Yes it takes a long time to render but since I am learning I will keep things small and simplish until I get a new machine. I honestly think more materials will follow and I am hoping SphericLabs will privide a repositry, a central point where we can upload and download materials ready for Luxus. ;) As for PAs providing Luxus Mats yeah I made a suggestion like that a few days ago elsewhere on the forum. We can live in hope but personally I did so much material tweaking before I am not too bothered.
One feature that Reality has that I would really like to see in Luxus is the option to create the render files without starting the render. I like to set up several images, then queue them all up in Lux set to run like 3 hours each; that way I can have several renders completed when I get up in the morning, or when I get home from work.
Right now, I'm using the save to file option then closing LuxRender. It works, but the export only option would be a nice convenience.
Here's a super neat feature in Luxrender. If you have more than one light in your scene and if you own Photoshop. First, turn on 'Use LuxRender GUI' under your Render settings. Run your render as usual. Export your render to "Light Groups to Tonemapped LDR Images". When you do this, just enter a name without a file extension. Lux will create a .png image for each light in your scene.
Then, the cool trick. Open Photoshop. Go to 'File' -> 'Scrips' -> 'Load Files into Stack'. Browse to where you exported the images and select each one of the light images that was created and open the batch into Photoshop. Each image will be loaded into a separate layer. Leave the bottom layer alone, but on the one above it and for all the rest, set the layer type to 'Screen'. This will stack each one over the other with png translucency. Once you have them all set, what you see should look like what you were looking at in the Luxrender window.
Now, if for instance, you want the backlight on the hair to be a bit brighter, but not the shoulders or any other object hit by the backlight, select that layer and select what you want to lighten... Do Image -> Brightness/Contrast -> adjust as needed, and only that area on that layer will be affected. The things you can do with this are endless! Postwork is totally redefined! One of the duh things is you can basically turn a light up or down very easily, should you decide one of your lights wasn't exactly right after you close Lux. It's mesmerizing just playing with it.
Have fun!
That is a very useful thing to know. Thank you very much :)
That is a very useful thing to know. Thank you very much :)
I suppose I left out one detail. The lights have to have different names for them to be created as different images. If you have five lights and 2 have the same name, you will only get 4 images... with the 2 having the same name being combined into one image.
It is really cool though. You can turn on or off a light just by hiding and showing the layer for that light. If you have preview turned on, you see realtime in photoshop what you are doing.
Yeah on the Luxus remembering too much about your scene. It also remembers too much if you decide to uncheck one of the boxes or change a material in the 'Luxus -Luxrender Material' interface. For instance, if you choose glass2 and volume and then decide to set it to glossy translucent and volume, the glass2 settings hang around in the Surfaces tab. It seems I have to delete my object and add it again and start over? If I'm seeing this right, I do hope they change that. Glad I'm just playing and don't have a complicated pose going. :)
you can share settings of a model or a set of models with the entire Reality 2 user base, and you can do it without leaving the Reality interface.
http://acsel.preta3d.com/
not bad for 22 minutes, I really need to figure out the settings for skin with luxus..
If you are seeing other settings it probably because you chose all with switcher or you are showing hidden properties.
If you are seeing other settings it probably because you chose all with switcher or you are showing hidden properties.
Yes, I understand that part. But, if I choose a material and set it to glass2 and then change my mind and go back in and set that material to perhaps glossy translucent, all of the settings for glass2 remain in the surfaces interface. If I change the material type, it seems like the other settings should go away.
Further, it seems like if I choose like volume and mesh and then decide I don't want to use mesh and uncheck mesh, it disappears from the interface but whatever settings I had chosen still are in affect on the render. I'm still need to verify this as I done so much with this today that I could be brain dead.
I would think that if you go back to the Luxus- Luxrender Material interface and make changes, whatever you have done would be replaced/deleted with your new selections? Or is there some other method for deleting what you don't want besides deleting the model?
Also, oddly, I have to put a check to 'Show Hidden Properties' in order to hide the hidden properties in Luxus? Not sure if this is a Daz Studio bug or not as it seems nothing changes in the standard properties area either way.
Is there a way to create LuxRender light portals with Luxus? I was thinking that one could convert a plane primitive to do this, but I'm not sure how, or whether that's even an option at present.
Yes, I understand that part. But, if I choose a material and set it to glass2 and then change my mind and go back in and set that material to perhaps glossy translucent, all of the settings for glass2 remain in the surfaces interface. If I change the material type, it seems like the other settings should go away.
Further, it seems like if I choose like volume and mesh and then decide I don't want to use mesh and uncheck mesh, it disappears from the interface but whatever settings I had chosen still are in affect on the render. I'm still need to verify this as I done so much with this today that I could be brain dead.
I would think that if you go back to the Luxus- Luxrender Material interface and make changes, whatever you have done would be replaced/deleted with your new selections? Or is there some other method for deleting what you don't want besides deleting the model?
Also, oddly, I have to put a check to 'Show Hidden Properties' in order to hide the hidden properties in Luxus? Not sure if this is a Daz Studio bug or not as it seems nothing changes in the standard properties area either way.
The idea was that you could switch without worrying about loosing your other settings. It was meant to be a feature. We could go with a finalize to clear out any parameters not used.
I would need to add an option to do this. Probably will be a "Luxus - LuxRender Portal" that would turn any selected surfaces into portal.
A little raw testing
1st Image the lighting is the Ring of Light in Daz Studio. Textures is AS Alice w/UbS2
2nd is a raw version of the Ring in Lux. Materials mostly auto translated, except the stool leg (Luxus Aluminum) and the eye surface & cornea (Luxus Glass)
Mixed feelings on the results. Still exceedingly grainy at 500S/p and the dynamic range is pretty flat but it feel promising for a 1st test.
Still hoping for answers to a couple questions.
Grouping lights: how can I do this in DS so Lux reads them as a group?
Grouped Mesh Lights: now that you’ve split up individual material zones into their own unique light, how can I combine them into groups?
IES Data: where can I plug it in?
Luxus Material Translations: Is it possible to see the final results of the auto-translation Luxus is doing?
Do you only need the LXM file for the wood material to appear on the LuxBall? Or do you need to download and do something with the LBM file as well?
IES are the goniometric light. The name reflects the name of the light in the LuxRender spec.
I thought about adding a merge all light groups but the benefits to having the light groups separate are just to useful I didn't. I have been told that LuxRender will go faster the less there are, but according to my mesearcments it not faster and the extra memory usage is mininal. I will probably add this since it is easy enough to do so.
As a workaround, you can relabel(in the Scene Pane) your lights to the same Label and the light groups will be the same. This will work on area light to, but only if the name of the materials are also the same..
I am confused by "Luxus Material Translations: Is it possible to see the final results of the auto-translation Luxus is doing?"
Do you only need the LXM file for the wood material to appear on the LuxBall? Or do you need to download and do something with the LBM file as well?
I just used the LXM file