Hi Guys!
I’ve dipped into Luxrender here and there over the years, but I still don’t seems to be getting scenes to look correct or render in a reasonable time. I think somewhere in my workflow I’m doing something wrong. Here’s a simple archviz interior I’ve been working on for testing purposes between render engines.
- A room with wall, floor and ceiling thickness modelled to real world scale.
- For the light source I add a sun lamp to point towards the window.
2a) the Sun is set at it’s defaults, Gain 1.000, Importance 1.00. Sun & Sky with Shadow ray samples: 1 and turbidity: 2.00. This seems a little low, but I’m not 100% certain. - Add a plane to the outside window and set it as a “PORTAL” with the Normals pointing in towards the room.
- I setup the material for the glass and set it to “Architectural”
- I use the suggested render option “MLT” unbiased.
- Used the option under camera “Firefly Rejection” option and set to 4 (suggested by Blender Cookie.
- Hit render, then watch as Lux opens and develops the image.
- While Lux is rendering, I change the “Linear” exposures to get the image to what I consider to be appropriate and balanced for the exposure.
- Then let cook, which seems to take ages, way too long to work efficiently. The noise doesn’t clear up very quickly – a simple room as described above with no textures and just Matte for materials is so slow incredibly so
My Efficiency is 1700%+ This I thought was good, but if I was to do a fully modelled/textured scene, I’d approximate 2-3 days rendering, is this normal?
I have a Win7 64Bit Core I3, with 7GB. - 4xThreads
Is this the correct method for such as scene, or am I missing something really obvious? Do I have to worry about the volumes, especially with the window glass?
Secondly I’ve just downloaded the latest release:
LuxRender 0.8 x64 OpenCL Setup.exe (0.8.0.1)
I was hoping to make use of the GPU option for OpenCL MLT+Bidirectional as I could do with a little speed enhancement, but as soon as I hit render it finishes and doesn’t attempt to load Luxrender External.
In the Blender Console I get these errors:
WARNING: Colour Management is switched off, render results may look too dark
INFO: Creating LuxRender context
Incompatible Lightstrategy for Hybrid Bidir (use “one”)
ERROR: Export aborted: Incompatible render settings
What’s going on?
My Nvidia card has the latest drivers and it’s a GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1GB) – I have no problem with cycles GPU using Cuda.
While I’m asking for help, might as well get it off my chest 
I have Pylux installed, but I notice that the Blenders render window image differs from the lux render window, different colours and contrast etc. I’m not particularity bothered about it, but I was wondering why it was different?
Thanks for any help on this, I’ve always wanted to put Luxrender into one of my projects, but I never get very far. I’ve also watched numerous tutorials, but none of them seem to follow the exact same method and frequently miss this that others have suggested.
Jay