Luxus for Carrara released! Intro sale price at 30% off.

Dartanbeck

3DAGE said:

if you're using a leaf with a separate alpha map,. you can use a Lux Mix with your leaf map, and a Null,. mixed with the alpha map.

I'd post images but I'm mid way through a render.

I'm trying this idea on Trans-mapped hair and it's not working. "Check Log File" > No Material 1 or some-such... where I have the texture map, No Amount value, where I have the alpha map.

Dartanbeck

I've just kinda started messing around with this, pretty much for the first time here, and... well... 

Okay, it says that simple materials are often auto-converted. I wasn't all that surprised to find that I need to make adjustments or whole new shaders, whatever. If I wanted to color a ball or something, I think that the constant referring to LuxRender Materials wiki would be fine. But what about manually converting shaders which are already using texture maps? Isn't there a nice helper sheet (or thread?) here somewhere to help initial users to get their figures into Lux? I looked at Phil's Resource Pack, which looks cool, but it doesn't seem to have anything in there for trying to convert conforming hair shaders into something that works in Lux. 

Does anyone have a link that explains how to use alpha maps along with texture maps in a Lux Surface shader? How to make realistic skin? Any other helpful LuxRender - Luxus for Carrara shader tutorials and/or helpful hints?

SphericLabs

In regards to Alpha Maps.  This is the general setup:

Lux Surface

 Material => Lux Mix

   Material 1 -> Lux Glossy or anything really

   Material 2 -> Lux Null

   Amount -> Texture Map -> Alpha Map

 

 

Dartanbeck

Oh... so the I put the image map inside Material 1 -> Lux Matte (or glossy)?

Dartanbeck

SphericLabs said:

In regards to Alpha Maps.  This is the general setup:

Lux Surface

 Material => Lux Mix

   Material 1 -> Lux Glossy or anything really

   Material 2 -> Lux Null

   Amount -> Texture Map -> Alpha Map

 

 

This is the arrangement I was trying. For material 1, however, I just had an image map in there. Thanks... I'll try this.

Dartanbeck

Hmmm... When I do that it just turns out white hair with no alpha applied. Without converting, it's black hair but with alpha. here's what I've tried:

Top Level = Lux Surface

Material = Lux Mix

    Material 1 = Lux Matte

          Diffuse = Texture Map (everything else blank, except the bump map under Bump)

     Material 2 = Lux Null

Amount = alpha map

Everything else I just left alone. In the Render room, I've set it to Lux Render via Luxus, left everything default.

Scene lit by Spherical map in Lux Infinite. That came out nicely in the render.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong - being such a newbie. I have the latest stable version of LuxRender 64 Open CL

Dartanbeck

This is a really nice Wiki they have for this. I'll get this down. Sorry for my initial lack of understanding and patience! ;)

In this whole initial thing though, I'm seeing one amazing Carrara plugin. You've really pulled out the stops on this thing, Spherical Labs! I remember when it was still in beta, and it was really neat to see how you tweaked this thing into being. And now to see what you've done to support what others have asked for... and now this thing is really slick!

The magic of this whole thing, like any other, is going to be in lighting and shaders - and this thing certainly provides the needs to knock that out... I just need to learn its language - and it appears that this wiki plus the manual will take care of getting those gears rolling. As always, just a bit busy to go 'all in' in one go, so I just have to soak in what I can, when I can. But it certainly is cool. The shader trees turn into an entirely new beast. Still not sure where I'm going wrong with my alpha maps, but I'm sure that'll just become another one of those slap-to-the-forehead moments once I discover where I'm screwing up! LOL

Dartanbeck

So strange!

I was getting frustrated last night with the above recipe not working. So I wanted to set it up again, same thing, take some screen shots, start a render, and ask why... what am I doing wrong?!!!

I set it up exactly like I (thought I) did last night and fired up Luxus to do its thing. I couldn't believe my eyes! The only shaders I've changed for this was the hair - everything else is just the original shaders. It just works!

Dartanbeck

So I've gone through the rest of the shaders that are visible in the camera and changed them to what seems to make sense without any more studying (yet). It's looking really nice so far - so I'm having fun playing with the lights. It takes a while on this little laptop so I'll be back later with the result.

Dartanbeck

It's looking pretty nice. If it weren't for those fireflies I could stop it right here. Awesome how easy it is. I'll just let it do its thing for a while.

Dartanbeck

Strange. By the time most of the fireflies were gone, there was no 'shine' left in the eye surface (Lux Glass). Bummer. I was using some red absorbtion in the skin, which might not be right, and may have been the cause of those fireflies. Gotta start somewhere, right? ;)

Headwax

Dartanbeck said:

So strange!

I was getting frustrated last night with the above recipe not working. So I wanted to set it up again, same thing, take some screen shots, start a render, and ask why... what am I doing wrong?!!!

I set it up exactly like I (thought I) did last night and fired up Luxus to do its thing. I couldn't believe my eyes! The only shaders I've changed for this was the hair - everything else is just the original shaders. It just works!

really like this effect

 

Dartanbeck

You mean the hair? Or the whole look of the image?

That's one of my experimental Carrara-made HDR spherical image backgrounds. They're really fun to make and work great for scene lighting ;)