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Well the first thing would be: I don't think there are "Glossiness and Specular" settings for Luxus. Are you sure you're editing the LuxRender material? The settings for LuxRender materials all start with "LuxRender" so to edit your surfaces with Luxus the best way would be to type "lux" into the search field in the surface tab after you added a LuxRender material to the surface you want to edit.
To edit the glossiness, in LuxRender, I think, you use the Specular Color, Specular IOR, Roughness U and Roughness V parameters. For wet skin I would try a rather bright specular color, maybe 100 100 100 or higher and a Roughness U / V value between 0,15 and 0.2. I wouldn't touch Specular IOR.
If i convert the skin with the specular maps to a LuxRender material then the area that is suppose to be wet just comes out as a black mass.
Perhaps i'm missing something when selecting the what material to use, but i've tried using Glossy, Glossy Translucent, Matte, and Matte Translucent all with the same effect.
Thanks for the suggestion but in this instance it doesn't quite work
Affects like water on skin are often best done with a shell. You make a Geometry shell and set its material to water, then use an alpha map to create the droplets.
When it comes to messing around with Geometry Shells I don't quite know what i'm doing (think i need to find a few tutorials on using geometry shells), but i think I might have got the effect I was after (tho it did take me all day)
Below are the setting I used in case they are useful to someone else, i've also included a test render to show the effect.
Placed the water droplet maps in Specular Color (used the LIE to place more that one map onto each other)
Glossiness 60%
Specular Color to 255,255,255
Specular Strength 100%
Reflection Color 255,255,255
Reflection Strength 85%
Refraction Color 255,255,255
Refraction Strength 75%
Index of Refraction 1.33 (the IOR of Water)
Render was stopped at 400 s/p and used 2 mesh lights
I'm having a weirdness with eye materials. I thought I remembered seeing a comment here somewhere saying we should make the eye cornea material (it's a Gen3 figure I'm working on right now) with no D|S textures, specular, reflection, anything, just add the LuxRender glass2 material. Doesn't work, I get the eyes dull and dark, not even much visible iris colour, even when the figure's looking almost directly into a sun&sky2; light.
Also still waiting for replies to my other questions, about setting up water materials (I thought I was getting somewhere, I was... confused) and how we're supposed to use NK files to get different metal surfaces (I get metals that all look alike).
I'm using Luxus for Carrara so it is vaguely possible it will be different for regular Luxus for Studio, but in my testing I found that it should be Luxrender glass1, not glass2 (glass2 relies on volume for it's effect, and the cornea is super thin and won't work right with glass2, at least in my experiments). Settings I found that worked for me for the cornea were:
Index of Refraction: 1.38 Refraction for the cornea is very important, as it takes the flat texture of your Iris and makes it pop.
Reflection Color: Changed to white (R - 255, G - 255, B - 255)
Transmission Color: Left at white (R - 255, G - 255, B - 255)
Cauchy B and Film: Both left at 0%
Hopefully that helps, but again I am using Luxus for Carrara, not Studio (which shouldn't matter as ultimately it's the settings for Luxrender that should matter)
If i convert the skin with the specular maps to a LuxRender material then the area that is suppose to be wet just comes out as a black mass.
Perhaps i'm missing something when selecting the what material to use, but i've tried using Glossy, Glossy Translucent, Matte, and Matte Translucent all with the same effect.
Thanks for the suggestion but in this instance it doesn't quite work
Glad you found a solution. Still, just for protocol, when you applied the LuxRender material, did you click the little box that said 'Copy Studio Parameters'? Otherwise, I assume it won't transfer any textures to Lux. (Also, for skin you always also want to click 'More Mesh Parameters' and, if you're using Glossy Translucent, 'Volume Parameters')
Ah, now we're getting somewhere — there isn't much of a reflection when I use a sun light, but switching to area lights gives much better-looking eyes. Good iris colour, and I can see nice clear light reflections already, with my test render not even up to 20 S/p yet. Thanks, I'll have to make a note of those settings.
Anyone know anything about my other questions?
I need a little help creating some atmospheric perspective with Luxus. I want to add a bit of haze to the image below...just enough to make the far away buildings look more far away and show subtle shadows ("God's Rays") coming off the buildings.
Pretty sure what I want is a Homogeneous Volume: but the properties in Luxus aren't an exact match to the Luxrender documentation. I put a 2000m sphere around the entire scene, set its Volume Type to "homogeneous", set the Scattering Scale (sigma_s?) to 0.01, and left everything else as a default. As you can see, it's not doing anything.
Anyone else accomplished this in Luxus? Are there other values I need to tweak, or am I going about this the wrong way entirely?
Thanks!
I think the settings might depend on your scene and also the size of your volume. However, here is a scene I rendered (still a bit noisy but you can already see the rays) and the settings I used.
Also, make sure that the camera is outside of your homogeneous volume or it will not work (it might work if you enclose the camera in its own volume though, but I haven't tried yet).
You might also want to play with focal length and DOF on your camera settings to get the effect you want.
Hope that helps!
Success at last! Here's a closeup of a couple of my girls in the Dream Home basement (first completely enclosed room I could think of) with area lights applied to the room light glass material. I also tried adding a bit of gloss to the teeth, but I'm not sure if that's actually worked. The render's been run to nearly 900S/p, and I think if it wasn't such an extreme closeup it would have been good enough earlier. Thanks for the tips.
Anyone know anything about my other questions?
Here is a little tip for when you have surfaces that just won't lose that solid grey appearance.
If you have Dreamlight's LDP-R product running the included "clearMats" script will set all Mats in the scene to not show the dreaded grey surface when rendered in Lux. I am not exactly sure what it does. It seems to do more than just set ambient to 0%.
Specular, maybe? I've found that to be the most frequent ruiner of looks-good-in-3Delight materials. If I don't turn down a Specular Color value of more than about 100, the grey starts to creep in. By the time it's over 200-ish, there's almost nothing left visible of the diffuse texture. I've tried converting such materials to LuxRender format first, and I must be doing something wrong because after tweaking Lux values I don't see any improvement — there isn't any improvement unless I adjust Specular Color before rendering.
I think the reason for this is that a distant/infinite light like a sunlight is also infinitely small, so the reflective highlights from a light source like that is also very very small. In Carrara one trick I often did was to parent a small spot light near the camera, with the intensity turned very low, just to ensure there was 'sparkle' in the eyes because of the highlights. But that trick won't work very well in Luxus, as it is real reflection and not the simulated specular effect we often use in biased render engines. I think the best solution is to use mesh lights as they emit light from across the width and length of whatever the mesh is that's emitting light - since it isn't infinitely small, the eyes give much better reflections.
I'm brand new to Luxus (and by extension, Luxrender) and haven't had much time to play around with it yet. You posted you were trying to find out how to make realistic water materials? That's pretty broad, oceans with froth and waves will be a lot different then a calm clear pool, or did you mean specular effects for water on skin, to simulate droplets? You also mentioned something about NK in interest of making good metal shaders for Luxus, but I confess I don't know what NK is (an acronym?).
While it would be nice if Luxus auto-converted every material perfectly, and I'm sure over time as it's developed it will improve, I think in general the best method will be to see what's auto-converted well-enough, then for those materials we want to refine/improve, it probably means googling the Luxrender forums and wiki to see what the best settings are for any specific thing, then seeing if there's a way to make a Luxus shader that will give us those same end results (and I think most of the time the Luxus shaders will allow for that, if we only figure out what settings to use).
I'll dig into water materials and see what I can discover, when I have a bit of time to play around :)
Is there a way to make Luxus just write out the luxrrender files without starting luxrender up? In a large scene, Studio and luxrender compete for memory, and it would be nice to exit Studio before starting the render.
Reality has this feature.
This feature is requested enough that it should be added.
If you are on windows, you can add a -v to the command line parameters at the bottom of render settings. It will launch LuxRender and print the version but that is it.
If i convert the skin with the specular maps to a LuxRender material then the area that is suppose to be wet just comes out as a black mass.
Perhaps i'm missing something when selecting the what material to use, but i've tried using Glossy, Glossy Translucent, Matte, and Matte Translucent all with the same effect.
Thanks for the suggestion but in this instance it doesn't quite work
Glad you found a solution. Still, just for protocol, when you applied the LuxRender material, did you click the little box that said 'Copy Studio Parameters'? Otherwise, I assume it won't transfer any textures to Lux. (Also, for skin you always also want to click 'More Mesh Parameters' and, if you're using Glossy Translucent, 'Volume Parameters')
Thanks for the suggestion, I will keep it in mind next time i need to convert a studio material to lux and I have time to do some more experimenting.
The water is mostly for shallow fountains and pools — I have a bunch of very nice scenery sets with big water features, just crying out for a good LuxRender water effect. Something like Via Serena, Hacienda Hermosa, or Platea. Liquids in a cup would be good to know as well. My big problem in figuring them out for myself is that a lot of the material in the LuxRender Wiki only says that such-and-such a thing can be done, when what I need is details of how to do it. The forums are apparently very useful, if you use LuxBlender.
As for the NK stuff, it's a method of defining how light reflects off different metals at different angles. The LuxRender forums have links to a bunch of archives of NK files, but they're a bit light on coloured alloys like brass or bronze, and it doesn't seem to matter what kind of NK file I plug into the parameter in the Metal2 material, I just get the same kind of silvery shiny metal. Apparently there's something else I need to do, that was left out of the instructions.
Keep in mind that the roughness values you specify have a huge impact on how it appears, in addition to what .nk file you supply. When you have roughness cranked all the way up, they all become super shiny near-mirror like.
As to availability of .nk files -- keep in mind they come primarily from the scientific community. And a lot of the measurements are taken on raw minerals only, not alloys, since the readings of an alloy will vary wildly based on the specific mix amounts used in the alloy.
cwichura is a LuxRender expert, but I would word it a little different:
-> When you have roughness cranked down towards zero, they all become super shiny near-mirror like.
Try the cu.nk(copper) or au.nk(gold) to see something a little different.
Yes, sorry for the confusion. Technically, 0 roughness == max shininess while 1 == dull (and nonphysically dull at that, anything greater than about .8 doesn't exist in the real world). When I said cranked up, I mean max effect more so than max value.
I know about the roughness settings and their limits, that seems to be coming out the way I expect. What I need to know is, do I do anything else apart from insert an NK file into the slot? What about the Preset, do I leave that set at "Fresnel" or choose another one?
Running quick test renders with the LuxBall scene, I'm using different NK files on different parts of the Luxball, but unless I choose something obviously different like gold or copper, both parts come out looking pretty much the same shiny colourless metal.
I know about the roughness settings and their limits, that seems to be coming out the way I expect. What I need to know is, do I do anything else apart from insert an NK file into the slot? What about the Preset, do I leave that set at "Fresnel" or choose another one?
Running quick test renders with the LuxBall scene, I'm using different NK files on different parts of the Luxball, but unless I choose something obviously different like gold or copper, both parts come out looking pretty much the same shiny colourless metal.
Preset must be set to "Fresnel File". Try Resige51.nk , it has a slight blue tint.
OK, trying that one now. Is there a list somewhere of what all these cryptic names mean? I remember enough of my 30-years-ago chemistry classes to have only the occasional hiccup with the SI element names (e.g. the couple dozen "gaas" files are presumably different types of Gallium Arsenide), but some of them have me stumped. And a bunch of the NK files I've picked up apparently fail with some kind of invalid header error. Is there an archive anywhere of NK data with the duds pruned out, so I don't need to dig them out of the error logs?
OK, trying that one now. Is there a list somewhere of what all these cryptic names mean? I remember enough of my 30-years-ago chemistry classes to have only the occasional hiccup with the SI element names (e.g. the couple dozen "gaas" files are presumably different types of Gallium Arsenide), but some of them have me stumped. And a bunch of the NK files I've picked up apparently fail with some kind of invalid header error. Is there an archive anywhere of NK data with the duds pruned out, so I don't need to dig them out of the error logs?
The Fresnel equations (or Fresnel conditions), deduced by Augustin-Jean Fresnel /frɛˈnɛl/, describe the behaviour of light when moving between media of differing refractive indices. The reflection of light that the equations predict is known as Fresnel reflection.
Sorry, I meant the names of the NK files I got from an archive pointed to by a few posts in the LuxRender forums. There are nearly 300 files in this bunch, many with names based on the standard 1- and 2-letter element name abbreviations. But lots of them have names that must make sense to a metallurgist, because they make no sense at all to me.
I'm running another test render with actual props in the LuxBall box this time, and it's beginning to look interesting. Let's see what it's like in a few more hours (only at a bit over 300 S/p so far).
Does anybody know how I Can rid of this white spot? (it's a spot light)
It's a spotlight in luxus / luxrender
I don't think it's possible to hide a light-emitting object if a camera has line-of-sight on it, like you can with a standard D|S Area Light. Possibly you could arrange your total scene and camera viewpoint so that the light is behind another object, but still shining in the direction you want it to?
And about my still-unanswered questions, I forgot all about those renders. Here's the results, at (I think) about 500 S/p and 750 S/p. I stopped there, because it looked like that was about as good as it was going to get. This was with the bumps that came with the props (Woodgod axe and one of the Danie/Marforno objects-for-thumping-with) applied at reasonable-ish values. I'm still sometimes getting pretty good results, sometimes getting something like this, and I wish I knew what I'm doing to get the "pretty good".
Awfully quiet in here, would I be better off visiting the LuxRender forums?
In LuxRender you have to treat light like real world lights. You couldn't hide a light sitting there in real life, so you can't hide it on screen in Lux either.
I would guess the bump strength or roughness is too high. Try removing the bump map.
The problem is, the bump map provides all the fine detail of the engraving on the metal parts. I'll try with the bump value turned down a bit more. What's the scale on that dial again, metres?