Luxus discussion II

SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
edited May 2013 in The Commons

Previous discussions
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cwichura said:
Looking at the source, inline mesh declarations also appear to use auto as the default accel type for each shape.

But the confusion here is over specifying the accel type at the mesh level or the scene level. I would argue that specifying it at the mesh level is something that should not be exposed, as most users are more likely to make things worse than help themselves by overriding the auto selection on a per-mesh basis. Bad meshes sometimes give QBVH problems, but those are so rare, it's really not worth worrying about. And the real solution is to fix the mesh, since while kdtree may load it, it's still gonna make the render suffer.

If you expose a parameter, it should only be for the scene-level accelerator used to collect all the none/global meshes at the end of scene prep. And again, I think for 99% of the cases, just setting it to qbvh is what you want, and doesn't really need to be exposed to the user.

Accelerator is entirely undocumented then.

Anyone interested can stick one of the following in the Render Settings, Extra Settings of Luxus


Accelerator "qbvh"
Accelerator "sqbvh"
Accelerator "kdtree"
Accelerator "tabreckdtree"
Accelerator "unsafekdtree"
Accelerator "bvh"

Some have parameters, but they are not documented, so I would go with the defaults..

Post edited by Richard Haseltine on
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Comments

  • FusionLAFusionLA Posts: 249
    edited April 2013

    fusionla said:
    fusionla said:
    Szark said:
    fusionla said:
    @ SphericLabs,
    Is it possible for you to add an Invert direction option for the Area/Mesh Light settings?
    Why can't you just turn it around 180 degrees...simple enough to do.

    Probably for something like a cylinder?


    Yes that would be correct, it's an option that Reality has.

    I can add it as an option, for now you can simple paste the following line into your Extra Settings on the Material
    ReverseOrientation


    @SphericLabs, did you get a chance to add this option with the new release?

    Doh! I knew I forget something.

    Who can blame you.... look how fast this thread grew!

    Also when you convert a surface to a Luxus light/emitter and use the Copy Studio Parameters, to copy over the diffuse texture to the LuxRender Light Color, making it good to use with skydomes and skyboxes.

    Been getting some strange results, with items just using the default DAZ Studio shader.
    Installed the new version, and compared the auto conversion with Reality.

    Looks like the Spec channel is not being Auto-Coverted good (posted an example about this before lost somewhere in this thread :) )
    Spent a lot of time going back and forward from the LuxRender wiki and Reality to see what was different.
    Seems like the Spec color needs to be lowered and Glossiness needs to be translated to the LuxRender roughness values.
    Attached is another example and part from the first example, I posted a while back.

    Keep up the good work!!!, Luxus is moving along pretty fast.

    Spec_Gloss_2nd_try_Luxus_vs_Reality.jpg
    1500 x 1830 - 254K
    Post edited by FusionLA on
  • Michael GMichael G Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    cwichura said:
    Looking at the source, inline mesh declarations also appear to use auto as the default accel type for each shape.

    But the confusion here is over specifying the accel type at the mesh level or the scene level. I would argue that specifying it at the mesh level is something that should not be exposed, as most users are more likely to make things worse than help themselves by overriding the auto selection on a per-mesh basis. Bad meshes sometimes give QBVH problems, but those are so rare, it's really not worth worrying about. And the real solution is to fix the mesh, since while kdtree may load it, it's still gonna make the render suffer.

    If you expose a parameter, it should only be for the scene-level accelerator used to collect all the none/global meshes at the end of scene prep. And again, I think for 99% of the cases, just setting it to qbvh is what you want, and doesn't really need to be exposed to the user.

    Accelerator is entirely undocumented then.

    Anyone interested can stick one of the following in the Render Settings, Extra Settings of Luxus

    
    Accelerator "qbvh"
    Accelerator "sqbvh"
    Accelerator "kdtree"
    Accelerator "tabreckdtree"
    Accelerator "unsafekdtree"
    Accelerator "bvh"
    

    Some have parameters, but they are not documented, so I would go with the defaults..

    No worries, was just a thought.

  • MadbatMadbat Posts: 382
    edited May 2013

    .

    Post edited by Madbat on
  • Dumor3DDumor3D Posts: 1,316
    edited December 1969

    It seems my Wine Me product has been discussed a bit over here! This is my first release so the who - what - where - how stuff AKA my store page, didn't show up until yesterday. Dumor3D.

    I think this might be the first product in the Daz Store with Luxus presets. I'm totally willing to be corrected on that.

    There have been a number of Luxus updates, some of which occurred during the development of Wine Me. I spent a lot of time over on the LuxRender docs tuning it. At the same time, everything done is within your surfaces interface, so if something needs a tweak it is available to you. Things like glass and wine colors are all just colors set within the surfaces area, so adding your own would be easy.

    All of that said, I would love feedback on the product and in particular my Luxus settings. I'm thinking this might need an update to match new Luxus updates, or maybe their updates will just make it look better! (one can hope)

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    dumorian said:
    It seems my Wine Me product has been discussed a bit over here! This is my first release so the who - what - where - how stuff AKA my store page, didn't show up until yesterday. Dumor3D.

    I think this might be the first product in the Daz Store with Luxus presets. I'm totally willing to be corrected on that.

    There have been a number of Luxus updates, some of which occurred during the development of Wine Me. I spent a lot of time over on the LuxRender docs tuning it. At the same time, everything done is within your surfaces interface, so if something needs a tweak it is available to you. Things like glass and wine colors are all just colors set within the surfaces area, so adding your own would be easy.

    All of that said, I would love feedback on the product and in particular my Luxus settings. I'm thinking this might need an update to match new Luxus updates, or maybe their updates will just make it look better! (one can hope)

    Luxus did not break anything in regards to your product. I checked several items.

  • Dumor3DDumor3D Posts: 1,316
    edited December 1969

    dumorian said:
    It seems my Wine Me product has been discussed a bit over here! This is my first release so the who - what - where - how stuff AKA my store page, didn't show up until yesterday. Dumor3D.

    I think this might be the first product in the Daz Store with Luxus presets. I'm totally willing to be corrected on that.

    There have been a number of Luxus updates, some of which occurred during the development of Wine Me. I spent a lot of time over on the LuxRender docs tuning it. At the same time, everything done is within your surfaces interface, so if something needs a tweak it is available to you. Things like glass and wine colors are all just colors set within the surfaces area, so adding your own would be easy.

    All of that said, I would love feedback on the product and in particular my Luxus settings. I'm thinking this might need an update to match new Luxus updates, or maybe their updates will just make it look better! (one can hope)

    Luxus did not break anything in regards to your product. I checked several items.

    Sweet!!! And thanks for looking into it! If in the future it does need any tweaks, I would like to take care of those. This is a new world that has opened to the Daz community. To me, it simply seemed logical to include those mats preset. In fairness to other devs out there, it can potentially add a fair amount of time. I worked pretty hard to get it to play nice in 3Delight out of the box as well as playing nice in Luxus.

    I am curious... do I get the first Luxus preset product feather in my cap? :)

    A hint to Wine Me users... If you don't need the awesome glass that LuxRender can deliver, you can set it back to architectural to speed up your renders. It would work best on more distant items... like glasses on a table behind your scene's main focal point.

  • Joe CotterJoe Cotter Posts: 3,258
    edited December 1969

    Hopefully we will have something that will allow us to set up props with automatic swapping of shaders based on distance from camera at some point ;p

  • cwichuracwichura Posts: 1,042
    edited December 1969

    Gedd said:
    Hopefully we will have something that will allow us to set up props with automatic swapping of shaders based on distance from camera at some point ;p

    LuxRender itself has no concept of this, so it'd be pretty hard to add to an exporter... What is your use case for this?
  • Joe CotterJoe Cotter Posts: 3,258
    edited December 1969

    Sorry, had to think a minute because it seemed obvious. If something is in the background it doesn't need the kind of details that it would if it were in mid ground, foreground or closeup. at some point, one either does a lot of texture swapping or has a lot of wasted cpu cycles.

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    Hmnm, the Javascripting support can almost already do this, just would need to expose some information about the object in the scene to the script.

    Yet, in the unbiased world I am guessing it is better to think in terms of the lights. A small "candle" light off in the distance needs to be "LOD"'d so LuxRender does not waste processing all the photons coming out of it. LuxRender seems to have this in the form of Light Importance, which you will find as a settings in all Luxus Lights.

    BUT, I would also guess that this is the job of the sampler and probably the reason the experts recommend metropolis. I would guess we are already benefiting from further way things are using less processing power.

  • cwichuracwichura Posts: 1,042
    edited May 2013

    Gedd said:
    Sorry, had to think a minute because it seemed obvious. If something is in the background it doesn't need the kind of details that it would if it were in mid ground, foreground or closeup. at some point, one either does a lot of texture swapping or has a lot of wasted cpu cycles.

    Lux already internally creates mipmaps for all image textures loaded, which is a technique for using images of different scales based on distance. "Swapping of shaders" sounded more like you wanted entirely different material definitions, which Lux does not support.
    Post edited by cwichura on
  • Joe CotterJoe Cotter Posts: 3,258
    edited May 2013

    Yes, I was specifically referring to shaders as there are multiple things that don't necessarily make sense as they are in a closeup if an object is in the distance, like bump or displacement maps, some transmaps, surface settings like specularity, etc.. It would be nice to be able to fine tune these on an object by object basis based on distance. It would be a good idea to do some test cases to see just how much and where it would be helpful to do vs just leaving the render engine to sort it out. Maybe after I get the other 10 projects I'm working on now done ;p

    Post edited by Joe Cotter on
  • cwichuracwichura Posts: 1,042
    edited December 1969

    Again, LuxRender itself has no support for what you are looking to do. So you'd have to change the material definitions in Studio based on where you placed your camera.

  • Joe CotterJoe Cotter Posts: 3,258
    edited May 2013

    Well... Lux is opensource... that means it can be modified, and Luxus modifies many things on the path between DS and Lux itself. Since it's not in any program that I know of, it could be coded in any program. As for placing the camera, that's just what gets handed off to Lux, one can modify the the file after it leaves DS on it's way to the render engine.

    It may be that it would be easier to code in an app like DS, I don't know. I didn't think that far ahead. It was just on the wish list of things I would like to see at some point.

    It may be that I am looking at it all wrong and there is some reason why that would be better handled another way as this is just something off the top of my head that isn't being handled other then in a limited way now that I know of.

    Post edited by Joe Cotter on
  • KickAir 8PKickAir 8P Posts: 1,865
    edited December 1969

    Single light (sun sky2), Auto Linear, ran a smidge over six hours, about 250 S/p -- the raw version's below, but in the final the only postwork's a bit on the squirrel's eye. I don't know if I've mentioned it recently, but the one thing I really love about Luxrender is its easy and beautifully realistic bright sunlight. Final version up in my deviantART gallery here.

    Gray Squirrel with Blue Flower

    PCI20130501-SquirrelScene05c-Lux01a.jpg
    1600 x 2000 - 3M
  • NedKellyNedKelly Posts: 63
    edited May 2013

    I have a noobie question about Luxus and material files. I have only had Luxus for a few days and still finding my way around it.
    Some of the materials are not appearing in the renders with LuxRender but they do appear when the image is rendered with 3Delight. It appears to be mainly creatures that are affected although some props as well have had the same issue. I'm guessing it is something in the settings but after two days of reading and experimenting I am still no closer to solving my problem. Time to ask people who actually know what they're doing for some advice I think.
    Here are some sample images to show what I'm babbling about, first one rendered with 3Delight the second with Lux.
    The dragons skin and the materials on the necklace are missing in the Lux render.
    The thing that confuses me about this is that the materials for the dragons eyes and tongue appear and their files are located in the same place.

    3delight.jpg
    1024 x 576 - 223K
    lux.jpg
    1024 x 576 - 173K
    Post edited by NedKelly on
  • kittenwyldekittenwylde Posts: 151
    edited December 1969

    I've had that problem before. For me, I assign whatever's missing a Lux material. Select a surface, make sure the surfaces tab is selected, and click on that menu at the top left corner (don't know its name, has a little triangle and four lines). Select "Luxus-LuxRender material" and pick a material. I start with matte and experiment from there. Then you should see the material render properly, and have a whole pile of extra options to play with as well. Hope this helps :)

  • NedKellyNedKelly Posts: 63
    edited December 1969

    @sithkitten
    Thank you so much for pointing me in the right direction. I will have to play with it to find out which settings suit best but at least now the skin is appearing in the render. I missed that dropdown when searching for settings so thanks again for pointing it out for me.

  • HellboyHellboy Posts: 1,437
    edited December 1969

    My render got 100% ready at 50 seconds. :gulp:
    Cristal clear without any grains. It was creepy! But I don't complain.

  • kittenwyldekittenwylde Posts: 151
    edited December 1969

    Wow! That's fast.
    And you're welcome, nedkelly!

  • willowfanwillowfan Posts: 238
    edited May 2013

    Can anyone recommend good material settings for black leather?

    Trying to render black leather it always seems to come out silvery grey and too shiny.

    On an unrelated note Accelerator "qbvh" makes a huge difference to render speed!

    Post edited by willowfan on
  • SloshSlosh Posts: 2,391
    edited December 1969

    Can anyone recommend good material settings for black leather?

    Trying to render black leather it always seems to come out silvery grey and too shiny.

    On an unrelated note Accelerator "qbvh" makes a huge difference to render speed!

    I uploaded these free leather and vinyl shaders to ShareCG: Leather and Vinyl Shaders for Luxus which you might want to download and try. Even if you don't use the shaders "as-is", the settings for them work out quite nicely with your own leather textures and bump maps. It could be a good starting point.

  • willowfanwillowfan Posts: 238
    edited December 1969

    D'Oh! :red:

    I'd completely forgotten those. I downloaded them when you first put them up!

    Render brewing now using them :)

  • HellboyHellboy Posts: 1,437
    edited December 1969

    Those shaders look great!
    Thank you!!

  • willowfanwillowfan Posts: 238
    edited December 1969

    And here's the render. Had to tone the glossiness way down on the dress but the treadz have the leather shader pretty much as is.

    gothchicktredzlux.jpg
    675 x 1080 - 114K
  • SloshSlosh Posts: 2,391
    edited December 1969

    Wow, the render came out great (I saw it in another thread about Lux Photo Studio). Glad you found some use for the shaders.

    Thanks, Hellboy, for the comment on the shaders. They look great in Lux, but not so hot in DS.

  • Michael GMichael G Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Wip test, LUX denim cloth for the jeans, Shoes all LUX glossy.

    amy_foot.jpg
    1415 x 2000 - 418K
  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    People, very awesome stuff!

    My current work on Luxus is focused improving autotranslation.


    Micheal_G, I am curious, how did you do the rips? Opacity?

  • Michael GMichael G Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    People, very awesome stuff!

    My current work on Luxus is focused improving autotranslation.


    Micheal_G, I am curious, how did you do the rips? Opacity?

    They use trans maps in the opacity channel. I didn't actually make them, they came as part of the dirty denim package.

  • HellboyHellboy Posts: 1,437
    edited December 1969

    Just finished this.

    Please, check the original size if you have the chance, I like how the detail turned out. :-P

    Guan_Yu_Statue.jpg
    1200 x 983 - 514K
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