New features include a refine area brush, noise-aware adaptive sampling (works best with simple path tracing, not bidir, stick to simple MLT for that), a port of Mitsuba’s cloth shader, a MUCH faster bloom filter, an overhauled render queue, more efficient dispersion support, and of course, bug fixes. (including a memory leak with hybrid rendering, and a weird bug in v1.1 that could cause chunks of objects to disappear). Full release notes and download links for builds at the link above.
If you find any issues, let us know! 1.2 final should be out in the near future (depending on people’s holiday schedules and what issues come up).
Finally, no the fancy crazy-fast pure-GPU renderer is not included, that is still a work in progress and will be in v1.3 (or whatever we decide to call it).
Hi, I’m reasonably new in blender but I only herd good things about the LuxRender. Right now I’m working with cycles but can you recommend LuxRender better than Cycles? And if so, how can i install it? Are there tutorials out there where i can learn it?
thank you very much.
As for Lux vs Cycles, it really, really depends on what it is you’re trying to render. Cycles has a simpler integrator, and as result is faster on easy lighting scenarios, but can struggle with more complex ones (such as interiors, particularly lights in fixtures). There’s also a few features you only find in one of them. For example, Lux has volume scattering, a fabric shader, easier to work with metals, the ability to define colors inputs with custom spectra, etc. On the other hand, Cycles has things like the ability to mix materials based on the “light path” (which part of the rendering process they are in, can be very useful for faking some things or compositing tricks), as well as much better fur rendering, realtime previews, etc.
In the end, sometimes you need to just try both for a particular job, and see which one handles it better. And some projects (like the one I’m currently working on) you wind up rendering different parts of the shot in each one and compositing them.
Spitting out releases every two months now?