Did you remember to switch out your old exporter for the new one? That sounds like the old bug with the materials panel that was in the 1.2RC1 version.
Yep, made sure to switch it out I downloaded the Luxblend25 one from the repositories, and that seems to be working a little better. I’ll just double check everything. However, I’m also getting a similar error with Yafaray all the sudden, so this may not be specific to Luxblend…
I’ve installed to Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04. In Windows, Luxrender seems to work fine with Blender 2.66. In Ubuntu, however, I’ve got an issue with Blender becoming unresponsive if “monitor external” is checked when a scene is being rendered. This was also the case with Lux 1.2RC. I do prefer to do my Blender work in Ubuntu as much as possible, so I wonder if it’s a problem that anyone else has had.
SLG renderer isn’t included in 1.2. The support is in LuxBlend, but it was supposed to be commented out in the release version (it’s only two lines). Some of the builds had a version of LuxBlend with that left in. It doesn’t really hurt anything, you can either ignore the SLG options or grab a test build with them: http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=30
Major advantage of Lux is the post relight of scenes. That can make rest renderings obsolete when exploring lighting situations and this workflow can also be used for animation as it was done with Maxwell.
Cycles however provides an interactive preview of the scene and that cuts down my time to explore materials and scene design dramatically.
As a product designer Cycles is actually my choice. I also own VRay for Rhino.
The only issue maybe sometimes could be noise but well also in VRay you can increase rendertime with quality settings.
Finally, Lux is getting vertex colors support, this will open the door for Lux being able to render creatures and other organic objects (as Vertex colors can allow a quick and easy way to mix materials without relying on handmade stencils). The hair support will help with that as well.
Also, I’m interested to see what the node options will be for Luxblend25, because if it also provides a healthy amount of fresnal/vector-based options than it might be worth giving the engine a testdrive again.
Lux has always supported nodes, they’re supported in another package’s UI, just not blender since blender has never had pynodes before. I’m happier than a kitten following a leaky cow as well as I have shy’d away from using lux of late since I didn’t want to set up a bunch of materials in their current exporter and have to redo them all.
Really impressive progress! Is it likely that we will be able to use the GPU for a render preview in the viewport when Lux 1.3 arrives, like can be done with cycles?
I downloaded the Luxblend25 one from the repositories, and that seems to be working a little better. I’ll just double check everything. However, I’m also getting a similar error with Yafaray all the sudden, so this may not be specific to Luxblend…
