INFO
This one is my third test with the same scene.
This time LuxRender 1.6 and Darktable 2.0.5 again. (Sorry I like this software so much that I couldn’t resist).
I went straight for the new LuxCore Api which is still experimental.It is in my opinion easier and more straight forward than the old one and I think a lot faster and most important of all you have Real Time Preview!
First I converted my materials from my original Cycles Scene. There out there two scripts that can convert materials and scene from Cycles to Lux respectively but none of them handled the conversions automatically, so I have to do some manual work.
I used Biased-path OpenCL to quickly tweak my materials and then I switched to Path OpenCL for my final render.
I din’t have any difficulties converting my material, except some artifacts whenever I used Bump textures in the fabrics but I guess this has to do with the messy meshes.
The lighting setup is extremely simple, just a Sun & Sky. Originally I’ve placed some Light Portals but unfortunately they are not supported in LuxCore yet.
I know that there is still some noise in my images but since my tests are done from a professionals point of view (you know were almost every time the deadlines are very tight) I decided to stop the rendering process in 10000 samples which resulted in approximately a little more than an hour and a half per render except from one camera that needed more samples, 20000 and took less than three hours.
DOF done inside LuxRender.
A couple of minor artifacts were fixed in Gimp and for the post production I went straight to Darktable.
Minor tweaks also done there.
A little noise-reduction, color correction, vignette… mostly typical stuff.
CONCLUSIONS
Lux render is definitely a “beast”, a physically based and unbiased rendering engine in constant development.
The new API makes things a lot easier and using all your computing power including both CPU and GPU is definitely an advantage…and of course RT Preview.
Another huge advantage of Lux though I didn’t took advantage of it my test (so I can have pretty similar conditions for each test) is LuxRenders distributed render. The easiest of all out there in my opinion (along with Mitsuba). You “install” Lux, then fire up all the machines that are sitting in your office and they will all contribute to your render.
I used to think that Lux was slow but in my tests it gave times similar to Cycles (on GPU). The good thing about Lux is that you don’t have to worry much after you setup your scene, you press the button and let the machine get rid of noise.
It is well integrated in Blender (of course it doesn’t feel as natural as Cycles, but I wasn’t expecting that either) and definetely is a top choice render engine if you’re in the FOSS side of things.
Maybe I would like to have some more biased algorithm choices in Lux, you know for those times when you need a render ready as fast as possible.
I think that Lux in combination with Darktable is a nice “photo-graphical-style” work-flow.
You can see my other tests here:
Cycles
Yafaray
