What about Luxus/Luxrender?
nDelphi
Posts: 1,920
I am curious. How come Luxus/Reality and Luxrender never really caught on with the community, especially the PAs.
Is there a reason for this? Was/is Luxrender materials hard to work with? Or was it understood that iRay was comming with official backing of DAZ 3D, so why bother?
Was it the slow development of Luxrender? Only now is Luxrender faster and has better GPU rendering.
I myself prefer Luxrender because of several main features:
1) The ability to stop and continue rendering.
2) Network rendering.
The drawback for Luxus/Luxrender, of course, is that PAs don't provide Luxrender materials with their products like they do now with iRay. So for every scene I have to work on all the materials.
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I didn't really like the render times to be quite honest. I purchased Reality and Luxus and the materials weren't really the issue. People were talking about spending 48 hours rendering an image and for me, speed is more important. Don't get me wrong, the renders were wonderful, but the workflow was a lot of added work even before you hit the render button. Plus when Octane Render came out, there really was no comparision when it came to speed --I'm only talking about speed. I think a lot of the Lux Render images are fantastic and if I was only doing one or two images in a month, that would be fine. But I work on graphical story telling so I would rather sacrifice a little on the quality end in order to speed up my workflow.
It caught on fairly wel I thought and still has a loyal following, it defiantly caught on with Posers users. I think some people are not interested unless it's free and has a make art button and works on their 10 year old laptop. Studio is an impressive piece of software but the vast majority of users are hobbyists, Lux by nature demands a more powerful rig than what you generally find on the shelves of best buy and wallmart, there is a learning curve associated with it, it's not a casual thing but I prefer it as well, (change lighting WHILE you render! How boss is that!!!)There is a tremendous amount of setup flexibility that can be done in the surfaces tab of a scene so the surfaces are either ready to go or require minor tweaking before you get to the Reality interface (Luxus could be set up in the Studio interface bit I didn't use it and can't comment on it) but I think people saw the interface and thought it would be like trying to send a rocket to the moon. If polled I would guess the majority of LuxRender in Studio also tend to be users who work with many other 3d packages their pipelines.
Daz will continue to push Iray and that's fine, not all Studio users will get the full benefit of it but those with good Nvidia cards just got a free and powerful engine so while it's not as precise as LuxRender it can be far faster. I run most of my renders at night or while I'm at work with lux's batch queue so time for me is meaningless (I sniff tainted clamato juice and blast vintage plink floyd into my headphones, that helps.) results is what I'm looking for.
The problem with Iray for me is a 4GB card is not going to work for the majority of my stuff, an 8GB card might. AMD has 8GB cards for $300-$400, Nvidia does not AFAICT, a 12GB Nvidia card will break my bank. Changing out my 12GB RAM for 24 will leave me enough so I don't need to bring peanut butter smeared on a playing card for lunch for six months. I can also work on a huge project close Studio and let Lux run unencumbered, network, queued, looped. I can do one of those things with 3Delight, I don't think I can do any of it with Iray unless Studio is running, I've only played with it for a bit and it didn't win me over yet. I love having yet another option but at this time it's like Cycles in Blender, I used it a few times and realized "Why am I using this, I have Luxrender already."
Up until Iray I used Reality / Luxrender almost exclusively with DS.
Yes, render times could be a bear, but they were workable when the scene was optomized. For example, removing objects from the scene that were out of view, grouping the lights, etc.
I switched over to Iray while waiting for the new Reality version to be released. It is my understanding that the render times should be in line with the current Iray results.
I tried Luxus, but wasn't happy with the interface. Nothing against it, it was just a workflow thing for me. Luxus' materials are integrated into DS and I just prefered the secondary approach with Reality.
I also tried Octane, but that's an entirely different story.
i use Luxus still.
the Eluxir makes it a win for me.
What is the Eluxir?
the Eluxir works with the luxus nodes in shade mixer.
the d/l link was in one of the luxus threads. don't know how to search for it nowadays
LuxRender has a different look and feel to it from iRay, IMO. Most of the time my Lux renders tend towards 'soap opera effect' -- realistic to the point that a fantasy image looks... well, unreal as a result, like a candid photo taken on a movie set. Obviously you can fix that both in Lux and in post-processing, but it added time and complexity.
Iray works pretty much out of the box for me. In a lot of ways it's the same workflow, but it's far more natural -- and the results are closer to what I had in my brain. Between that, the closer integration with Daz-native tools, and the plethora of shaders that came out for it (plus the Iray Uber shader, which does a surprisingly good job at 'Iraying up' 3Delight shaders, most of the time), it became my go-to almost immediately. The soap opera effect is significantly reduced in it, as well.
But, sometimes Lux is a better choice for me, still. It depends on what I'm going for.
I understand that people have their preferences. But my original question was why the PAs never really supported Luxrender. When Reality came out I said it is a matter of time for PAs to start including material/shaders for their products and that never happened, and then when Luxus came around, I said this time definitely, but even then it never happened.
Right now the only conclusion that I can come to is that Luxrender never had official support from DAZ 3D itself.
I see more luxrender promos overr at Renderosicty than here. I am pretty sure the reason more PAs don't use it is the speed issue, time is money and when a decent render takes longer than a few hours, it can become quite tedious.
I was an early adopter of Reality/LuxRender and still use it for renders today.
I love LuxRender. It is simple and gives very good renders.
Unfortunably Eluxir is dead and Luxus have some years no update (dead too?).
Reality is an option. But it is to far away from LuxRender physics for me.
To a PA time in money. If a PA has a product (character, clothing, prop, set, ...) that is ready with DAZ materials, how much more time will it take him/her to develop Luxus/Luxrender materials and how many additional sales will having Luxus/Luxrender materials generate?
I suspect most PAs did not think the extra sales would be worth the time it would take them to develop the materials. This would be especially true for a PA that had never used Luxus/Luxrender and was completely unfamilar with how to create material. If DAZ had released Luxus materials for some of the DAZ original products, it might have taken off to some extent. It would have given PAs examples of reasonable material. The render times are still a big obstacle to wide acceptance. Only some customers will live with those long render times and the long render times mean it takes longer for PA to tweak maaterial.
With Iray, I'm sure DAZ is pressuing PAs to support Iray. There are some products being released with only Iray materials (no 3Delight). Probably most PAs that sell a lot of products in the DAZ store have gotten higher end Nvida cards so their render times are not all that different from 3Delight.
I think the only way to answer that was to understand that is to understand how users adopted or didn't adopt it as a solution.
I think, at least this is the way I do it myself and is probably true for a lot of other adopters of alternate renderers...we tend to do it ourselves.
We don't really care. As long as the basics are there, it doesn't matter what renderer is used, because no matter what, surface tweaking is going to happen (heck, I don't usually leave the 3DL materials alone...I seldom use the 'premade' shader presets, anyway). So Luxus/Reality/Octane or whatever presets are a bit redundant.
Iray is significantly faster than Luxrender. I think that's probably the biggest selling point. A render which took me 6 hours on Lux finished in less than 30 minutes using Iray. Another major advantage that Iray has is that because it's built into Daz Studio, the material settings are all more easily accessed than they would be through Reality or even Luxus since you can use all of the familiar surface selection tools and quick-search options.
The only major downside is that unlike Luxus or Reality, you can't easily create a sun which shines from a specific direction. Streamlining this seemingly basic task would make my workflow a lot easier than setting a null as a SS node and trying to 'guesstimate' the angle. It only seems to work some of the time to boot.
But ease of use and speed combined make Iray a very easy winner so far. Though I'm definitely wanting to upgrade my graphics card to take better advantage of its full features.
Parent the Sun to a camera and use the camera to move around normally. Wherever the camera being used as the null is pointing to that is the direction of your Sun. Name the camera Sun Camera so you know not to use it for anything else.
I'm concidering Lux, from what I've heard and seen of the soon to be update making it super fast.
IRay, in my experience is SUPER crashy, very unstable, and frankly very ineffeciant.
Could somebody who has both render engines please post some side-by-side comparrisons of the same image?
Luxus is simple and has only a rudimentary support of displacement. The autoconversion has room for improvement. With Eluxir it coud be a great product and a good alternative to Reality..
But in Eluxir many nodes are empty and it has not left the preview.
Interesting, does that actually work? The documentation states that, and I quote, "The direction of light is calculated between the position of the chosen node and the center of the environment dome.", so I took that to mean that it ignores the existing angle of the object and just 'draws' a straight line between the SS Sun node and the middle of the scene to calculate the angle used.
The thread with the download links for Eluxir is here:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/18555/eluxir-hypergraph-for-luxrender-beta/p1
CHEERS!
I might have that wrong then. I used it on a simple scene with the object in the middle. That might be my confusion?
Personally, I stopped using the Reality plugin quite early-on as I feel that the interface in many parts is too disjunct from Daz Studio panes (not as integrated as e.g. Luxus into DAZ Studio materials) and basically is not providing a direct access to all LuxRender capabilities. I used LuxRender via Luxus for some time, but with the advent of Iray I simply have no use for LuxRender anymore.
The direct support by DAZ respective Nvidia is from my point of view crucial for the success of Iray and the quick PA support it receives at this point and so is the seemless integration into the DAZ Studio panes for DAZ Studio users. Furthermore, the pretty good automatic conversion of many materials helps a lot and IMHO is way better than what Reality/Luxus achieved there.
I do have got a MacBook Pro with ATI graphics chip so I would benefit from the upcoming LuxCore boost actually, but that still wouldn't make me use LuxRender anymore due to the huge avantage Iray has got on the support side, the DAZ Studio integration, and ease-of-use. No matter how good the support of a third-party plugin is by the respective creator, said plugins may still just break due to changed functionality in DAZ Studio and if a plugin is supported by DAZ itself then this is typically taken care of.
As for the sun direction in Iray ... that is what the sun dial is for?!?
That was doen a while back, the trouble is even though both are unbiased renderers and so should work in a similar way it is very hard to get a fair, like-for-like comparison between them.
I should probably correct you here. DAZ never pressures PAs to do anything, that's simply not how our relationship works, and that's why we release the content the way we do. And certain items get more support because ultimately that's what the customers demand. We make the iray products (and you probably could ask other PAs the same thing) because we like Iray and that's what customers want. It's that simple. I know it's been a few weeks since I've made an actual 3delight render, and Iray has brought new people into DAZ Studio including those that I've seen in the past say they would never open the program.
On the subject of luxrender support, there was a time when there were quite a few light sets and items with reality/luxrender support, and those items are no longer in the store. I did promos using luxrender as well my products and other PAs' light sets, and those items haven't been put back. All I will say is Iray is the much stable path to support, which I why I use Iray. I'm sure that's the case for other PAs as well.
There is the Sun Dial found in the Render setting Pane under the first Tab. It has a visible cue of the sun's position and angle. Expand the Sun Dial twice and find a Sun Chain, select that and adjust the sun's position via the parameters pane. Then in the Environment section of the render settings point to the Sun, the last bone of the Sun Dial is the Sun.
I expect it's mainly a matter of economics and market share. Making products for a plugin that people have to buy will always give you a smaller potential market and the PAs are trying to make money. Since Iray is included free with Daz Studio the potential market includes all Daz Studio users.
And I'm not sure that Daz ever provides "official" support for any third party add-ons to Studio. I suspect they adopt a capitalist free market approach, no intervention, let the market decide.
Probably because Iray is the default engine now and it`s available for free to everyone as part of DAZ Studio.
As much as I liked LuxRender via Reality, and then Luxus, they`re a separate comercial product. I only have 2 products so far, but I never considered that much to include Luxus presets as it didn`t seemed as popular as Reality, but I wasn`t using or spending in Reality anymore.
In short, Iray feels like a more natural step for me.
Ok, as said before it is hard to compare Luxrender with Iray, material defintions are different. But here a try in comparing light (For the render, there is also a ceiling on top of the 'room' so it is fully enclosed).
No material conversions has been done except for the emitter. The emitter is a 4cm sphere at 100Watt, 6500K, 35 efficacy/effeciency (Luxus and reality use diff terms, though AFAIK efficay is the correct term).
All images are about 11min render-time (S/p, iterations are not of interest here)
The material differences were to be expected, but the difference in exposure a litte less...... mind you, the Iray render did have GPU assistance, not so for luxrender.....