much improved SPPM rendering (stochastic progressive photon mapping)
much improved hybrid path rendering
new hybrid bidir rendering
improved network rendering with better reconnect logic
improved rendering speed and memory usage
updated GUI
point and spot lights now have lighting power and efficacy parameters like area lights
normal mapping support
much improved motion capabilities
updated carpaint model so that it better matches the original paper
new colordepth texture to assist in defining volume parameters from their appearance
new layered material allowing arbitrary layering of materials
new glossycoating material allowing to make any material glossy
new fresnel functions to allow configuration from RGB colors, mixing, gradients, …
new metal2 material much more flexible than the previous metal material
colorspace fixes
better linear tonemapper behaviour regarding real lighting schemes
improved loop subivision surfaces handling
new direct sampling of lights for bidirectional
faster image buffer handling
new SQBVH accelerator given better results than standard QBVH (still experimental)
much improved build system with reduced executable sizes thanks to the use of DLLs
lots of bug fixes and improvements all around
Also, for LuxBlend, you’ll find lots of new toys, including a new streamlined render settings panel, compositor support, on-the-fly updating of 3D view colors, support for some render API features (such as updating the render progress bar and partial scene export), an option to export point lights as spherical area lights, and, of course, support for the new features in LuxRender 1.0.
Happy blending, and let us know what issues you find!
I just wanted to flesh out this point a bit for those who haven’t followed the dev progress closely. The “Partial PLY export” option now uses the Update API from Blender to “intelligently” determine which meshes it needs to export since last time.
This is of course limited to within the same Blender session. It also doesn’t do deep inspection, so for example simply entering and exiting edit mode will trigger a re-export.
Also note that due to internal Blender limitations it will not be able to determine changes which doesn’t affect the viewport. So if you for example change the render subdiv amount, but not the preview amount, it will think the mesh is the same. Simply force an update by changing the preview amount or entering edit mode.
But if you simply move an object then it should just export the changed transformation, and not the PLY file, which can cut down on the exporter time significantly when tweaking.
This is indeed a very impressive list, congratulations on jumping to version 1.0!
I downloaded it, and tested with current 2.62 Trunk from today and it works fine. The UI became better in my opinion and it’s quite well integrated already!
What about rendering in the 3D View? Anything planed?
EDIT: I cannot use the Open CL , I don’t even know how to enable that, so many rendering features but SO messy, would be better if you have less features but in a much cleaner way, the UI is terrible, hard to set up even the most basic things, Cycles has less options and works much better.
Just select “hybrid path” from the “rendering mode” menu. That’s it.
How would you like to see the UI go? Lux and LuxBlend are open source apps, if you think they could be better, help improve them. We’re open to patches or suggestions.
[2012-04-16 18:30:07 Error: 3] The LightsSamplingStrategy must be ONE_UNIFORM.
About the UI, just copy some nice UI like cycles or octane, KISS (keep it simple,stupid), delete unused or old render systems, I don’t get the point in having such a list of techniques if there’s only 1 or 2 ready for production without entering in an insane amount of rendertime. Better focus in a small list and a huge list.
I can only see external as option, not internal, I don’t know how to manage such an amount of options, features, versions and so on, I think I’ll stick with Cycles, thanks anyway, good luck.
Seems it picked up your old LuxRender path setting then. This is something we could improve I think.
Some time ago I thought about adding a global “show advanced options” checkbox, so we could hide a lot of the options which are not needed for most users. Seems a good time to take another look at that
Congratulations for the release to Luxrender team!
I second the “show advanced options” checkbox.
I’ll test it with some internal scenes where Cycles is less than ideal, but will really miss the realtime viewport rendering for quick material tweaking, just saying.
Wow, this renderer is epic. I have known about it for awhile, but never messed with it much. I was having trouble until I noticed a little button in the materials dialog “convert Blender materials” or something like that, clicked it, and pow, all is well. The renders are so much nicer than even what Cycles puts out (with basic non-node materials, I know I could achieve a good effect with Cycles, and am not bashing it in any way).
