looking for renderer alpha testers

Hi all,

It’s radiance here the ex coordinator of the luxrender project.

I’m starting a new project, a new render engine.

EDIT !!!: I’m no longer looking for people, i’ve already received more than enough emails from people.


I’m looking for a small amount of people who are interested in being early alpha/beta testers.
You’d have to be able with blender, know you’re way around 3d apps and modeling, have experience with physically based renderers (like luxrender, yafaray, indigo), and initially own a system with a decent nvidia 8 series or higher video card. (not the cheap ones or laptop chipsets, but the midrange to highrange desktop cards)

I’m not sure if this project will be open source or not, i’m undecided, and people need money to buy food nowadays in this economic climate.
If it won’t be open-source, the people who have helped out testing will offcourse get free licenses.

If you’re interested please contact me at terrence27 at gmail dot com

Yours,
Radiance

You split from the Luxrender project to start creating a new render engine?

This is the problem with independent opensource renderer projects, people deciding to create their own projects instead of collaborating on an existing project or exiting an existing project to create their own project, instead of a great open-source render engine that could compete with the likes of Vray and MentalRay like what BI, Yafray, or Lux could become if people interested in developing a render dev, team worked on an existing project, you instead have a big basket of render engines that each have their own limitations and their own set of features they don’t have yet.

Such is the way of opensource and can give commercial app. users ammo for saying why they think OpenSource can’t compete with commercial.

I’m not trying to pull you down, I just want you to think why we don’t have an opensource render engine to rule them all yet. (capabilities and features surpassing all the other free renderers and a fair number of commercial renderers)

I’m not calling you a traitor, but think about this, do you think POVray could’ve been a kickbutt, incredibly powerful render engine to compete with the commercial heavyweights if most of the open source teams that created their own render engine worked on POVray instead, getting so powerful it could’ve supported every feature that Blender has now?

Oh snap! BURN!

There are probably a lot of factors we don’t know about, don’t be so quick to judge CD.

Why don't all the great writers, directors, and actors just work on one uber-movie? Because they have different visions for it. Same goes for software. People are people.

@Radiance, unfortunatley my experience with external renderers is limited.

Cyborg Dragon: I know it saddens you that radiance has not made it his life’s mission to create this ‘all-power one-stop-shop renderer’ of YOUR dreams, but such a thing is likely never to be a reality, anyway.

btw: Qualifying your last statement with “I’m not calling you a traitor” implies that you may actually feel that way about someone who you don’t even know, and who owes you nothing.

radiance: I’ll be e-mailing you shortly to offer some help.

email sent, forgot to mention I’ve got an nvidia gts 250 in my desktop machine.

@CD: maybe you should try being a software developer yourself? in many cases it simply isn’t possible to integrate everything into one engine (e.g. something demands a large rewrite/refactor that may break things, disagreements among lead developers/contributors, conflict of interest, whoever manages repositories and/or releases jumped ship, etc)

Hmm…

So someone qualified decides to go the hardware renderer route and what do they get? …a bunch of grief.

A gpu based renderer has to be one of the most requested features on this forum. Admittedly most of the requests are for a ‘free as in beer’ gpu renderer and are misguided in the ease it can be implemented in BI but it does seem a pretty popular request.

Nvidia only?
:confused:

Hi radiance. Be sure to let us know when there is a mailing list we can subscribe to. I would be very interested in such a project, though as it is now I’m afraid I don’t have the time to be of much help with anything.

I think there are some points to what CD’s saying. Things may progress faster with a team of people working together. It’s not that “all” the greats are needed to make an uber-movie, just a few who are willing to stay until the project’s end.

puts on flame retardant suit

That said, I’d really like to see how this new project turns out (if it does).

A GPU accelerated renderer would be very interesting!
Some of the unbiased guys might protest, but the Parthenon renderer
gave very nice, untextured fast results, and I saw a vray realtime rendering demonstration
that caused the audience in attendance to audibly gasp:
“Yes that’s right…With our new beta we have realtime, 20 frames a second.”
“Gasp!!”
Then the camera got all shakey, like there was a disturbance in the auditorium,
but it was just because the camera man was excited.
So that’s good it looks like someone is running with that ball, with the
possibility of producing a renderer capable of textures and animation.
At this point I’d say you should just do it all by yourself, I don’t know how you do it!

Radience, great to see you again and you know i would love to help out, but i only have a piddly old 6200, anyway i wish you the best of luck in your new venture and hope all works well :slight_smile:

Why all the talk of VRay, it isn’t a GPU accelerated unbiased render engine. Why the comparison?

In my opinion VRay is what Lux could have become if it hadn’t gone the solely Unbiased route.

Yet another unbiased engine, open source or not? They create more problems than they solve and work on the premise of throwing large amounts of hardware at it in an attempt to solve a self imposed problem. Slow and wasteful.

Hey radiance… just emulating mfoxdogg here saying it’s good to see you’re out there and still going strong.

Another Indigo scenario? Sorry Radiance, unless it’s GPL it won’t be worth the time to contribute anything. This “undecided” makes for a real joke these days as everyone knows what will happen in the end.

if it is not for you than it is not for you, for stills I find lux fantastic and you can use it for animations the are options not to use unbiased methods you just have to spend a little time configuring things.

I would love to help but will only meet the requirement of having a good video card in December.

I wish you all the best in your endevours, I think proving that you can build commerical products around Blender is just as important as the many FOSS projects that are built around Blender.

but think about this, do you think POVray could’ve been a kickbutt, incredibly powerful render engine to compete with the commercial heavyweights if most of the open source teams that created their own render engine worked on POVray instead, getting so powerful it could’ve supported every feature that Blender has now?
Hi Mr. Know-it-all:

POVray was released as open source in June 2004. I don’t believe it uses a GPL compatible license though. Radiance was released as open source in December 2002.

One of the reasons told by Jandro when he started to work on YafRay back in 2000-2001 was that he looked for an open source GPL raytracer and found nothing.

hey radiance, if you do reply to this thread, is it possible to clarify the reasons why you left luxrender? Because I’m sure that will affect some people wanting to help out. (well it does for me anyway)

Hi all,

Thanks for the many mails i’ve received, i’ll prepare some reply messages with informations and send them tomorrow to all who’s contacted me.
I think i’ve got enough people to help testing for now.

I knew this thread was going to turn into a discussion regarding my leaving the lux project, and the usual negative posts you might expect in the community.
I don’t think it matters much to discuss all this further, so i’m just going to give some replies to the questions, and i won’t discuss further after that.

I’ve tried to do that in the past, i’ve tried to unite the yafray and lux projects a long time ago,
which did’nt work. (the yafaray devs weren’t interested and I felt i was treated as an adversary)
I’ve tried to suggest integrating lux into blender, or upgrading BI to support unbiased techniques, and have met with virtually no support/interest from the blender devs.

btw, povray is a very old renderer, which would need a near complete rewrite to make it do what i have in mind.

I think i’m the one that has been ripped off most of all by the indigo story, don’t know if you knew but i worked about 1 year on the indigo site/community and never got anything when nicholas went commercial.
I’m not fooling anyone here, i think it’s clear and honest to say this will be a commercial project right now, not promising it to be GPL to get help and then turning my back.

I left because i lost control, the lux project has turned into a community thing, and as such everyone wants his say.
Having to convince 10 people of new ideas and stuff that needs fixing with 5 page long discussions on a forum is’nt driving my inspiration anymore.
I can’t work on such a project as I want to do things my way.

Finally, I just want to say that i’ve spent nearly 3 years full-time on luxrender now, and before that about 1 year on indigo and i’ve done this all for free for everyone.
I’ve been in constant financial issues due to it personally, had work related issues, and my family has been calling me an idiot for wasting my time on it.
I really dont appreciate negative criticism about all this after all the work i’ve done for the community.
I’ve left luxrender in capable hands (jeanphi) so i’m sure the project will stay progressing as before.

My new project, will be commercial, but it won’t be a rip-off like indigo, i’m honest from the start about it,
and i’m not going to charge hundreds of euros for it either.

‘undecided’ for me means i’m not sure, i’d like to develop it first, and sell it cheaply once it’s at that level of maturity.
If I lose interest or something else turns up i might open source it. I simply don’t know.

It’s either this or quit the whole thing and go work in the private sector, it’s a tough world and people need money to pay rent/buy food.

My new idea is not what you think it is, it’s not a renderer per se, and it’s not similar to any other renderers around.
You’ll have to wait and see what it is.

Radiance

Thank you for clearing up your reasons.