LuxRender v0.5 Released.

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Hi everybody :),

The LuxRender community team is pleased to announce the release of LuxRender version 0.5, an open source physically based render engine.
This is the first significant release on the road towards version 1.0, and has a large number of new features and major rewrites.

You too can help and accelerate luxrender development by helping us test this release, providing us with your experiences and feedback on our forums, and contributing nice gallery renders.

A new gallery has been placed online here: http://www.luxrender.net/gallery

Downloads & Release Notes

See the v0.5 release wiki page with all downloads and getting started information:
http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/index.php/LuxRender_v0.5_Release

New Features and Changes

http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/images/b/b6/Luxv05collageblender.jpg

Full Spectral rendering
The engine now performs all lighting calculations by sampling full spectra instead of RGB colours.

New Sampling Infrastructure
The sampling infrastructure has been rewritten in a modular way which allows combinations of modern samplers and integrators.
Traditional random and quasi random samplers have new film sampling choices, and intelligent samplers such as MLT (Metropolis Light Transport) and ERPT (Energy Redistribution PT) are available.

Biased and Unbiased integrators
All integrators can be combined with any of the samplers as above:

‘’‘Unbiased’’’: Path Tracing, Bidirectional Path Tracing

‘’‘Biased’’’: Direct lighting (can be used for traditional raytracing w/ ambient occlusion),
Photon Mapping with optional final gather

Hierarchical 2D & 3D procedural material and texture system
Various 2D & 3D procedural textures can be used to modulate all channels of all materials luxrender supports, and infinitely complex hierarchical mixes of them can be constructed.
Various mapping types can be used on 2D textures such as UV, planar, cylindrical and spherical.

Native support for all Blender procedural textures
All blender 3D procedural textures have been ported to the source code and are natively implemented with the same parameters/controls as in blender.

Displacement mapping and engine level subdivision
Mesh objects can be supplied as base meshes and can be subdivided internally in the engine, and displacement mapping using the new hierarchical texture system can be applied.

Distributed network rendering & network transparent API
The network rendering code has been finalized and can be used for distributed progressive rendering across multiple computers.

Volumes/Participating Media rendering
Homogenous, exponential density and 3D volume data can now be rendered for effects such as mist, smoke, lightrays, etc…

User Interface
A new cross-platform GUI has been developed using the wxwidgets toolkit, which will be the foundation for upcoming interactive features.
A console binary is also provided for headless rendering.

Exporters

  • LuxBlend (Blender)
  • LuxMaya (Autodesk Maya®)
  • LuXSI (Softimage XSI®)

Luxblend (blender exporter) has been completeley rewritten and provides a complete integrated material editor and a lot of new controls & presets to use the engine’s new features.
A new exporter for Autodesk Maya® is available, aswell as an exporter for Softimage XSI®.

Module list


Accelerators - tabreckdtree, kdtree, grid, bruteforce
Cameras - perspective, orthographic, environment, realistic
Filters - box, gaussian, mitchell/netravali, lanczos/sinc, triangle
Surface Integrators - bidirectional, directlighting, exphotonmap, particletracing, path(2)
Volume Integrators - emission only, single scattering
Lights - area (mesh emitter), distant (parallel), goniometric, infinite (environment), infinitesample, point, spot, projection, physical sun/sky
Materials - carpaint, glass, matte, mattetranslucent, metal, mirror, mix, null, plastic, roughglass, shinymetal, substrate
Samplers - ERPT, Metropolis, halton, lowdiscrepancy, random
PixelSamplers - linear, tile, lowdiscrepancy, random, vegas
Shapes - barytrianglemesh, cone, cylinder, disk, heightfield, hyperboloid, lenscomponent, loopsubdiv, nurbs, paraboloid, plymesh, sphere, waldtrianglemesh
SPDs - blackbody, irregular, regular, rgbillum
Textures - bilerp, checkerboard, constant, dots, fbm, harlequin, imagemap, marble, mix, scale, uv, windy, wrinkled, blender_blend, blender_clouds, blender_distortednoise, blender_magic, blender_marble, blender_musgrave, blender_noise, blender_stucci, blender_voronoi, blender_wood
Tonemaps - contrast, highcontrast, maxwhite, nonlinear, reinhard
Volumes - exponential, homogenous, volumegrid
UIs - console, wxwidgets GUI, FLTK1 GUI

Enjoy :),
Radiance

2

congrats devs!

3

I tried it once, but it was hard to use with Blender, so I use Indigo now :slight_smile:

4

Photoguy I tried it once, but it was hard to use with Blender, so I use Indigo now

well, that was a while ago then, blender integration is now superior to blendigo/indigo. :slight_smile:

Radiance

5

You also support direct light?

Congrats for the next release - looks like a major jump.

Claas

6

/luxrender-gcc: error while loading shared libraries: libboost_program_options-gcc42-mt-1_34_1.so.1.34.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

7

great work Radiance.
looks awesome.
are Blender Materials/Textures/Halo’s supported?
(cannot test yet i’m on the wrong comp.)
looking at the incredibly detailed ui for the script/plugin it’s no wonder the devs backed you so well.
I hope to see this with Yafaray & BI in the Render menu soon!
yay LuxRender.

8

Wow, nice images!

I have, in the last days, lurked around the lux forum a little bit, checking out the progress. But I never realized how far you’ve actually got with the renderer… I will download this right away…

Keep up the good work and good luck with the TV show :wink:

/t3d

9

Hi,

try the binary with ‘icc’ in it instead. (it’s also in the package), it’s statically linked.

to run the gcc binary, you’ll need to install some dependencies first,
i suggest you post on our forums as i’m not a linux dev myself.

i’ll add some documentation about this in the release page asap.

alternatively you can compile from the sources,
it’s fairly simple, you can just do what’s listed here: http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/index.php/Building_on_Linux

Radiance

10

blender materials and halos aren’t as they are very different concepts in luxrender.
blender textures are though :slight_smile:

Radiance

11

Thanks!, the ICC don’t work for me too, but I will report all in your forums see ya! :wink:

12

Great job Radiance! :slight_smile:

Your dedication and hard work is paying off!

Koba

13

Awesome! Do you have a nightsky simulation integrated? Last time I checked there was only daytime sky simulation.

14

I don’t know, turn your back for five minutes…
Last time I looked (3 weeks ago) Luxrender would not directly import blender mats. It would open a panel where you had to manualy re-set them. Has this been fixed?

Great work and some stunning stuff in the new gallery!

15

I’m curious, do you have particles integrated? This would be an awesome feature. (Imagine BBB - unbiased!)

16

Hey the render preset is a great Idea - this helps a lot.
Maybe having interior exterior added because to be honest
till today I have real understanding of what to select because
of technical reasons.

I used some of the biased systems and I got render artifacts.
Does it render like Blender bucket by bucket or like Lux did
it before refining it with each new pass?

17

Looks great! But, still no subsurface scattering?

18

i tried downloading the OS X file and i got an .exe :eek:

any ideas?

19

try this one:

EDIT: UPDATED BUILD
http://www.jensverwiebe.de/Jens%20Verwiebe/temp/Lux-0-5-OSXintel.zip

Please look for Jens post for his upcoming builds!

Thanks to him we have it on os x !!!

20

thanks for that!

one more thing - the zip contained the python script, a text file called CMakeLists, and two unknown files called luxconsole and luxrender. am i missing something? :spin:

boy do i feel noobish lol :o