Luxus discussion II

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  • cwichuracwichura Posts: 1,042
    edited December 1969

    Both luxrender.exe and luxconsole.exe are in the same location? I believe that in the non-GUI mode, Luxus invokes luxconsole instead of luxrender. if you run LuxRender manually, does it start up ok?

  • WilmapWilmap Posts: 2,917
    edited December 1969

    The “halt at time” and halt at samples per pixel are bot set to zero - I haven't changed anything.

  • WilmapWilmap Posts: 2,917
    edited December 1969

    cwichura said:
    Both luxrender.exe and luxconsole.exe are in the same location? I believe that in the non-GUI mode, Luxus invokes luxconsole instead of luxrender. if you run LuxRender manually, does it start up ok?

    Yes to both parts of your question.

  • Jim_1831252Jim_1831252 Posts: 728
    edited December 1969

    Have you tried hitting the return to defult settings down the bottom of the render tab?

  • WilmapWilmap Posts: 2,917
    edited December 1969

    Yes, done that.

  • Jim_1831252Jim_1831252 Posts: 728
    edited May 2013

    :( Tried deleting Lux and installing fresh? Are you using the 1.2 release or one of the weekly builds?

    That's all I have. I'm going to do that dying/sleeping thing I was just talking about.

    Post edited by Jim_1831252 on
  • WilmapWilmap Posts: 2,917
    edited December 1969

    I have the latest Luxrender release (1.2)

    Will try uninstalling and reinstalling. Thanks for your time.

  • WilmapWilmap Posts: 2,917
    edited December 1969

    Yes!!!! Uninstalling and re-installing sorted it.

    Now works fine.:-)

    Thanks for your help.

  • Jim_1831252Jim_1831252 Posts: 728
    edited December 1969

    Awesome. Glad that worked :)

  • Michael GMichael G Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Decided to do another Outlander.

    Alice body shape for Victoria 4
    The outlander
    Grungewall
    All by Alfaseed

    Changed the wall panels to mirrored with a thin film to add colour, the caustics were a pleasant surprise. Lit with sun/sky 2 and rendered to 4.36k samples using Luxus and LuxRender 1.3 beta.

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  • edited December 1969

    I am stopping by for some help finally, as it seems I have hit a brick wall in my fight with Luxus/Lux. What I am trying to do, I am not sure is even possible to do, so I might as well check. I have added an image so it can be seen what I am trying to explain. What I am trying to do, is get a faint orb light inside of the lamps, and have the glass be colored, and show when the light comes through it. So far, all I get is a big ball of bright light, and the glass is just a black outline, no color or anything. I've tried glass and glass 2, unsure on what the heck the settings should be for this? I know on the multi-colored one, I do want to keep the colors, and get the stained glass colored light patterns on near objects. Right now I have the orbs set to "null" "light parameters" "volume parameters" I have the volume set as "homogeneous" and the colors set to grey and white.

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  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    loserinc said:
    I am stopping by for some help finally, as it seems I have hit a brick wall in my fight with Luxus/Lux. What I am trying to do, I am not sure is even possible to do, so I might as well check. I have added an image so it can be seen what I am trying to explain. What I am trying to do, is get a faint orb light inside of the lamps, and have the glass be colored, and show when the light comes through it. So far, all I get is a big ball of bright light, and the glass is just a black outline, no color or anything. I've tried glass and glass 2, unsure on what the heck the settings should be for this? I know on the multi-colored one, I do want to keep the colors, and get the stained glass colored light patterns on near objects. Right now I have the orbs set to "null" "light parameters" "volume parameters" I have the volume set as "homogeneous" and the colors set to grey and white.

    So the light is inside the glass and you expect the light that hits the camera from the inside the glass should be the color of the glass?
    -> You almost certainly need to crank up the absorption.

    I would use the shader preset that comes with Luxus called "Glass2 - Blue" on your glass object and crank up the Volume Absorption Scale. I would would start with 2000 or so, till you see the light that travels directly from the orb through the glass and to your eye is the color blue.

  • edited December 1969

    So the light is inside the glass and you expect the light that hits the camera from the inside the glass should be the color of the glass?
    -> You almost certainly need to crank up the absorption.

    I would use the shader preset that comes with Luxus called "Glass2 - Blue" on your glass object and crank up the Volume Absorption Scale. I would would start with 2000 or so, till you see the light that travels directly from the orb through the glass and to your eye is the color blue.

    Ok, thank you. I will try that. This whole thing with Lux is new to me, so I still don't understand what most of those sliders are for. I'm a bit of a n00b there.

  • cwichuracwichura Posts: 1,042
    edited May 2013

    loserinc said:
    What I am trying to do, is get a faint orb light inside of the lamps, and have the glass be colored, and show when the light comes through it. So far, all I get is a big ball of bright light, and the glass is just a black outline, no color or anything.

    I have the DM lanterns you show in your example image, as well as several other DM lanterns, and have used them many times in LuxRender. I use Reality, but the principal described here should work in Luxus as well.

    First off, do not use volumetric glass for the DM lanterns; they have no thickness to the glass surfaces, which is a requirement for volumetric glass to work correctly. Even with the entirely self-contained lanterns like the stained-glass honeycomb lantern, you wouldn't want to use volumetric glass because Lux would see it as if the lantern was a solid block of glass all the way through. Obviously, that's not the way lanterns are in the real world.

    So you want to use either architectural glass or rough glass, depending on the effect you want. For the stained-glass honeycomb lantern, you probably want to use architectural. Additionally, if I recall correctly, the colour texture DM supplies for the glass in that lantern is very dark, so you need to gain the texture up some, otherwise it renders pretty much black, even with a light inside it. I usually hide the 'flame' material that DM puts in their lanterns (which is typically two image-mapped planes at 90 degrees from each other) and instead put in a small, low resolution cylinder in the flame's place to be the lantern light. Make a cylinder primitive that is 1 segment along the length, ~16 sides, .1cm in diameter, and 1cm in height. Parent it to the lantern, adjust its transform to place it where the flame should be, and then adjust the y scale to make it taller if need be. Then set the colour temp to around 1900k to give it an orange glow for flame. (Though with the stained-glass type lanterns, its probably better to leave the colour temp at 6500k.) You can also use a pointlight instead of the cylinder (some of my older renders did this), but the cylinder gives a more realistic look.

    Example of the stained-glass honeycomb lantern (note, the entire scene is very darkly lit and if you're on a Mac, it will display excessively dark due to the colourspace tags dA adds to previews unless you use the download link to view it - Windows displays it just fine): Forest Fairy

    Using rough glass gives a nice effect when the lantern is meant to be clear glass (e.g., absorption is zero). It gives you a kind of bloom effect inside the lantern. Set the roughness very high, between 500-1000 depending on taste. Examples: Arrival of the Gorgons (NSFW) (this had colour temp left at 6500k for both lanterns) Halloween Ritual 2012 (NSFW) (uses the bowl lantern from your example image, with the lights at 1900k and low roughness of 150) Descent (another DM lantern (Elven Rock, if I recall correctly) at 1900k with roughness of 500)

    Also, initially it helps to put the lantern lights in their own light groups. Determine the overall exposure for your scene, using a fixed tonemapper like linear -- not one of the auto tonemappers. Leave the lanterns at a default gain of 1. Start up the scene at low resolution, and then tweak the gains to get the desired lantern glows. Often this requires turning the lights inside the lanterns down considerably. Once you've determined the appropriate gains, bake those directly into your scene and drop the separate light groups for each lantern. (Each light group results in considerable memory usage plus a hit to render speed, so for final renders, you want as few light groups as possible. Also, baked gains and light colours are more accurate than ones adjusted at rendertime through the Lux GUI -- ESPECIALLY if you alter the colour of the light.)

    FYI: Reality's roughness of 1000 is native Lux roughness of .1. Reality 150 is native .015. And so forth...

    Post edited by cwichura on
  • edited December 1969

    Thank you so much Cwichura :) I'm copy pasting that to a text file so I can mess around with that and get it to work. That picture of the fairy is exactly what I want the lantern to do :) Glad to know it's possible :D I'll eventually get the hang of this stuff :)

  • kittenwyldekittenwylde Posts: 151
    edited December 1969

    I'm having a weird problem. I've lost the ability to assign Luxus materials. The menu option is just plain gone. And to make my mood even cheerier, I just tried to post a message asking for help with all the juicy details in it, and the dratted thing vanished. Gone, into the Forum Black Hole. So if another post from me whining about my problem shows up, sorry.
    So here's what happened: everything worked fine until I installed Studio 4.6. That was a nightmare, involving CMS issues and vanishing database files (yes, even my backups went missing. Don't ask, I don't know.). I finally got everything working and reorganized, spent a few days playing with the new shaders, started messing around with Luxus material settings... and found I can't use them. If an item, like the luxball or the Luxus test scene, has materials already assigned, they show up as sliders. But I can't change "matte" to "glass" or anything else.
    I'm using Studio 4.6, Luxus 1.0.0.5, and LuxRender 1.2.1. Any help, suggestions, or anything at all will be greatly appreciated. Attached is a picture of the menu with the missing options. Am I missing something blindingly obvious?

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  • Jay_NOLAJay_NOLA Posts: 1,145
    edited May 2013

    Having the same problem sithkitten. I tried uninstalling Luxus and reinstalling and it still is showing up.

    I'm using the Windows 32 bit version of 1.0.0.5 on DS 4.6.

    Post edited by Jay_NOLA on
  • kittenwyldekittenwylde Posts: 151
    edited December 1969

    Thanks for saying you've got the problem too! I've been going crazy, trying to figure out what I did to break Luxus. But if it's more than just me, it's a real problem, and someone will fix it once recovered from the holiday. Whew! Sorry you're having the problem too, but man do I feel better now, knowing it's not just me. :)

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    Reload your workspace.

  • Jim_1831252Jim_1831252 Posts: 728
    edited December 1969

    If anyone needs any help or knows anyone that does I've just finished part one of my Luxus/LuxRender beginner's guide. Part one covers setting up materials and lights. Part two will cover exporting, render settings, and Lux's GUI.

    Hope this helps out a little with this rather complex render engine and its plugin. Feel free to offer any feedback.

  • kittenwyldekittenwylde Posts: 151
    edited December 1969

    Reload your workspace.

    Well, that was easy! Workspace reloaded, Luxus options back where they belong. Thank you so much!
  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    jimzombie said:
    If anyone needs any help or knows anyone that does I've just finished part one of my Luxus/LuxRender beginner's guide. Part one covers setting up materials and lights. Part two will cover exporting, render settings, and Lux's GUI.

    Hope this helps out a little with this rather complex render engine and its plugin. Feel free to offer any feedback.

    Very excellent.

  • Jim_1831252Jim_1831252 Posts: 728
    edited December 1969

    Thanks ;)

  • KeryaKerya Posts: 10,943
    edited December 1969

    Thank you! You are a very nice Zombie!

  • Jay_NOLAJay_NOLA Posts: 1,145
    edited December 1969

    I removed the menu.dsx file from C:\Users\Owner\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3d\Studio 4 and restarted Studio. That fixed it. I tried reloading the workspace but that wasn't working for some reason.

  • Jim_1831252Jim_1831252 Posts: 728
    edited December 1969

    Kerya said:
    Thank you! You are a very nice Zombie!

    Thanks :D I actually learnt a good deal while doing this. I ended up exploring off my usual usage path and discovered a little more of what things do and how/why they work, so it is quite a fun project - not over yet!

  • Jim_1831252Jim_1831252 Posts: 728
    edited May 2013

    Here's the second part of the Luxus Beginner's Guide.

    Post edited by Jim_1831252 on
  • WilmapWilmap Posts: 2,917
    edited December 1969

    Your link send me to AND.

    However I found the tutorial on your blog.

    Thanks very much, will read through them both and see what I can learn.:-)

  • Jim_1831252Jim_1831252 Posts: 728
    edited December 1969

    Oops! Thanks for letting me know. All fixed. Hope you're getting some useful stuff out of the articles.

  • Michael GMichael G Posts: 0
    edited June 2013

    Simulated cloth test using Lux render cloth material. Ignore the model skin, she will get a full Lux make over lol, come to think of it she looks like a blow up doll :D

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    Post edited by Michael G on
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