Luxus discussion
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cwichura: if there was a "thank you" button here, I would have clicked it a lot of times now! Thank you!
I've seen this request before and I support it except that I would like to see a Render forum, not a Luxus specific forum. I have both Reality and Luxus as well as lots of lighting sets designed for 3Delight. I'd like to see a lighting and rendering forum where Luxrender and Octane and other engines can be discussed. Who knows - one day I might be able to afford Octane (though I doubt it) ;)
cwichura: Thanks for explaining the efficiency stat for me. Maybe you can shed some light on the texture size option for the renderer. My body texture is 4000x4000. Should I set the texture capture to the same to preserve quality, or is it something not really noticed? I'm guessing it will have more of an effect for close up shots.
I've seen this request before and I support it except that I would like to see a Render forum, not a Luxus specific forum. I have both Reality and Luxus as well as lots of lighting sets designed for 3Delight. I'd like to see a lighting and rendering forum where Luxrender and Octane and other engines can be discussed. Who knows - one day I might be able to afford Octane (though I doubt it) ;)
A forum focused on renderers in DS would certainly be easier than having to visit multiple forums or wade through a single, unfocused one. I'll see if I can put one together after work today. I can only hope some of the incredibly helpful people around here would like to contribute.
I think Luxus really needs its own forum section.
Then we could have threads with specific titles and actually find the information we need.
Good luck with that request. I been trying to get them to sticky this thread and they are not even biting on that.
Your right though, if you want to glean information that is specific to your particular need you have to go threw 60+ pages to find it.
They probably wont do this as Luxus is considered a PA product and is treated the same way for example as the "Look at my hair" product .
A good idea but then we would have to have a subforum for every DS plugin would we not?
I think I can go through this thread and extract the important stuff and do a best of. Even add it to the manual.
Bea,
I have done some tests on DragonBraid Hair. I started from scratch and just let the autoconvert handle it, I did the 04 preset(redish hair). It rendered gray hair. The specular had taken over. So selected all the materials and changed specular color(the DAZ one) and set it to 32, 32, 32. Much better and no skull cap weirdness.
I would recommend starting over(you can just select all the materials and remove the LuxRender Properties in the Luxus - LuxRender Matarial action) and let the autoconvert handle it. Of course tweak the specular.
The problem of the skull cap showing when you manually setup the material I am not sure about. I selected the skull cap, did " Luxus - LuxRender Matarial" chose matte and click the "copy studio parameters" and the skull cap looks fine.
hehe, yes.. the forums need a 'like' button ;p
A good idea but then we would have to have a subforum for every DS plugin would we not?
And what would be wrong with that? If they were grouped under 'Plugins and Add-ons' they would only take one line in the main forum index.
I only have direct experience with Reality, but I am going on the assumption that texture collection in Luxus works on the same principal as it does in Reality. That said, there are three main reasons why you might want to enable texture collection:
1) As already mentioned by Szark in another response, you are preparing a scene on one machine and intend to copy everything over to another machine to actually render it. In this case, enabling texture collection will pull all the texture files used by the scene together in one location, making it easy to copy them over to the other machine. Otherwise, you'd have to go hunting through your content library for all the texture files and fix all the file path references in the scene file exported by Reality/Luxus. In this case, you typically want to leave the texture resolution at "max" (or "original" or whatever Luxus calls it).
2) You intend to render the scene using SLG, rather than LuxRender. SLG requires that all textures fit in GPU memory, which is often considerably smaller than main system memory. (E.g., 1-2GB max) Thus, it's VERY easy for the textures to exceed your available GPU memory, especially if you scene has any complexity to it at all. In this case, you'd enable texture collection and tell it to reduce their texture maps to say 25% of original size. This will (hopefully) allow them to fit in GPU memory, but at the expense of degrading the image quality. For close-ups, this is suboptimal as the reduced texture quality will become quite obvious and you are better off using full Lux. (Note that Hybrid mode does NOT place the textures in GPU memory; it only sends the mesh geometry to the GPU. Thus, you do not need to reduce texture quality when using Hybrid mode.)
3) (This applies to Reality at least, not sure how Luxus handles MLIE textures.) Your scene has surfaces configured to use MLIE textures. DAZ Studio "compiles" MLIE textures into a TIF file that it places in its temporary directory. When Studio is both launched and exited, it wipes out everything in its temporary directory. Thus, the MLIE texture(s) is(are) deleted. If you tried to start LuxRender on the scene after closing Studio, you would get file not found errors for the missing MLIE TIF file(s) and end up with the default pure white texture that Lux substitutes in when it can't load an image map. In this case, enabling collect textures will copy those temporary TIF file(s) to the scene's project so they are not lost when you close Studio. Again, unless you intend to use SLG to render the scene, you should set the collect texture resolution to max.
Thanks. Happy to help.
Bea,
I have done some tests on DragonBraid Hair. I started from scratch and just let the autoconvert handle it, I did the 04 preset(redish hair). It rendered gray hair. The specular had taken over. So selected all the materials and changed specular color(the DAZ one) and set it to 32, 32, 32. Much better and no skull cap weirdness.
I would recommend starting over(you can just select all the materials and remove the LuxRender Properties in the Luxus - LuxRender Matarial action) and let the autoconvert handle it. Of course tweak the specular.
The problem of the skull cap showing when you manually setup the material I am not sure about. I selected the skull cap, did " Luxus - LuxRender Matarial" chose matte and click the "copy studio parameters" and the skull cap looks fine.
Thanks :) I will check it out I appreciate you testing it for me :)
Another good reason to collect textures, if like myself one keeps their content on an external drive. One does not need to have it plugged in to render one's scene.
I keep getting this error in the log file
"[2013-03-29 09:46:12 Info: 0] Loading texture: 'test 3_files/AK_DbaseTRS0.tif'...
[2013-03-29 09:46:12 Info: 2] FreeImage error, format: TIFF: 'Unable to handle this format: bitspersample = 8, samplesperpixel = 65535, photometric = 1'
[2013-03-29 09:46:12 Error: 4] Image unsupported
[2013-03-29 09:46:12 Info: 0] Memory used for imagemap 'test 3_files/AK_DbaseTRS0.tif': 0KBytes
[2013-03-29 09:46:12 Info: 0] Loading texture: 'test 3_files/AK_DbaseBUM0.tif'...
[2013-03-29 09:46:12 Info: 2] FreeImage error, format: TIFF: 'Unable to handle this format: bitspersample = 8, samplesperpixel = 65535, photometric = 1'
[2013-03-29 09:46:12 Error: 4] Image unsupported"
Can you open the TIF file in Photoshop or GIMP? If so, resave it as a PNG file and point the surface that uses it at the new file.
TIF has so many varients that it's pretty common that not everything will read every one of them. (Though the FreeImage library used by LuxRender is better than many.)
but they are not tifs in DAZ Studio- they are jpgs that are being converted,. If you look at the log luxus converts the jpgs to tifs
Luxus will convert to tiffs(Using studio) when collect textures is enabled. It must write out the tifs in 8 bit format in certain cases. LuxRender does not seem to like the 8 bit tifs.
I would turn collect textures off, although I am pretty sure your render will continue and look great even with this error.
the problem is the texture that it is not collecting is the transmaps
Transmaps are important. Turn off collect textures. I will PM you tomorrow.
Thank you I am sure it is something I am doing wrong
First time using the volume settings inLUXUS so I had a go at making god rays, im aware there's no bump mapping but this was just a test. Added a little bloom to the light, im unsure as to why the window looks solid, I put the texture map in the glass transmission and set it to pure white, used an infinite light maybe that had some thing to do with it. No portal as this plugin don`t seam to support portals yet, unless im missing some thing really simple in making them anyway hope the render looks good. Rendered with LUX v1.2.1 to 4.21k samples, 10 hours using the DAZ plugin LUXUS.
@sphericlabs Im having problems using the fresnel files included with LUXUS, LUX is not loading them up and the metal2 material is show up as completely black.
Which Metal2 Shader doesn;t work for you, they all seem to work for me. This is the Gold one, hardly a stunning render, but it does show that it works. Are you selecting the item in the Scene pane AND in the Surfaces pane when applying the shader?
Where are the fresnel files located? I could try them too, it may be that you need the latest version of Luxus or Luxrender?
I'm definitely improving with my Lux materials I feel. That said, my most recent render is about 18 hours in and still looks fairly noisy in places. It's currently at 1280+ samples, but looks fairly realistic. I'm quite pleased with how the scene is coming along, but I wish I had an easier way to reduce the render times.
It's possible it's the reflections causing the trouble. It's set to a 30%/70% mirror and glossy mix. I had wanted the glossy surface to reflect light on its own, which should be possible, but I wasn't getting expected results so I played my trump card instead. Appearance wise, it's pretty good, but it's still long winded.
Other materials used in the scene include a glossy material for the shoe plastic, metal on the zipper, and cloth straps and clothes. Any tips for speeding up future renders?
I am guessing you got it so shinny you are seeing the black of space reflected off the super shiny metal. Increase the U and V roughness.
Transmaps are important. Turn off collect textures. I will PM you tomorrow.
Pm'ing doesn't help those of us who are watching and want to know what to do if we run into the problem ;p
Pm'ing doesn't help those of us who are watching and want to know what to do if we run into the problem ;p
The error only occurs with Windows version of LuxRender, and only at a somewhat rare occurrence. Also, the render will continue, so look at the image generated by LuxRender to determine if you need to worry about it.
If this is happening to you, the solution to the problem is to
1) Don't collect textures if you are rendering on your own machine and are getting this problem..
2) Wait for LuxRender on windows to support 8 bit tifs(They work on Linux and Mac)
3) Wait for the next update to Luxus, which will not collect textures as tiff(assuming my testing of another format goes well).
4) Alter the textures to avoid them being converted to 8 bit tiffs(I don't know yet the reasoning or what the magic formula for this is, but I am sure I will figure it out).
I am guessing you got it so shinny you are seeing the black of space reflected off the super shiny metal. Increase the U and V roughness.
sussed it, you were correct, thanks.