Upgraded to 2.55, installed Lux, strange user pref window, etc.

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

When I heard about LuxRender yesterday and saw some examples, I was intrigued enough to upgrade from 2.49 to 2.55 and install Lux 0.7…

However, I have a few questions.

  1. How in the hell do I use LuxBlend? Videos tuts are not helping me any
  2. It seems 2.55 has a strange quirk with second windows (eg. the user pref window). I get this distorted text that is not at all legible.

Blender user pref fail.jpg1024×639 88 KB

Thank you for your help. I want to go from this:

Chupacabra (complete).jpg1024×576 15.5 KB

To something a bit more realistic.

2

Last time I checked, Luxrender doesn’t have a version that’s compatible with 2.55. There is something called SmallLuxGPU that’s still very experimental, and it’s used with Blender 2.55, but it works very differently and I’m not familiar with it. It would probably be much easier to create in 2.55 and use LuxRender with LuxBlend for 2.49 (I’ve used that a lot and it tends to work very well) to do the rendering.

3

You need LuxBlend25, read my post here:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=203812&p=1748801&viewfull=1#post1748801

Then further be advised, depending on your build of Blender 2.5 the API has been adjusted and won’t work with LuxBlend25 at the moment:
http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=5027

4

LuxBlend25 works fine with the current Blender svn, most of what was discussed in that thread has been fixed. Your text in user prefs looks like a bug in Blender or maybe an OpenGL issue. That might be fixed a newer build to, there have been 100+ bugfixes since 2.55 was released.

Oh, and LB25 does NOT work with the official 2.55 builds, grab a fresh one from graphicall or build your own, or just wait for 2.56 next week.

5

Today, I executed my scripts and I pull Blender from SVN (33841) and compiled, I also cleaned & pulled LuxBlend25 (552) from Mercury, and I pulled the latest weekly build (LuxRender 0.8-dev Windows build of 14-12-2010) which I had already, but updated just the same, & update pylux accordingly and still fails for me when enabling the addon. … and yes, all of this worked fine for me in the past.

Whether I’m an idiot or not doesn’t matter, the point is still the same. There are builds of each that will not work with each other, just be aware of what they are.

6

Okay, I’m able to use LuxRender in Blender, but it said that I needed pylux. I download pylux and copied to the correct (AFAIK) location.

I moved the pylux-test-1a855684f942 folder to:

C:\Users<my name>\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\blender\2.55\scripts\addons\luxrender

And I still get the same error/warning message. WTF am I doing wrong? I am so frustrated right now. The hell one has to go through for the sake of photorealism. :rolleyes::spin::no:

Oh well, I’ll figure this s**t out eventually.

7

Pylux is in the directory with Lux wherever you installed/unzipped it. In the Lux directory there should be a Python3 directory, in there is the pylux.pyd. You copy that file to your scripts/addon/luxrender directory with the luxblend25.

8

Nope and nope. :frowning: I can’t find this Python3 dir anywhere. Not in AppData, not in Program Files. No Python3, not pylux.pyd anywhere. Thanks for your help, though.

9

It comes in the weekly builds, I’m pretty sure (but far from certain) you can still go to the 0.7RC if you want with it
http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=30

10

So now I go into the Windows search bar and type in Python3 – viola! There it is. I copy the pylux.pyd into the C:\Users<me>\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.55\scripts\addons\luxrender directory, and I open up Blender to an error saying:

AttributeError: ‘RNA_types’ object has no attributes ‘luxrender_camera’

and a bunch of other confusing mumbo jumbo crap. What does all this mean and how can I fix it?

Also, because of this, Blender won’t even let me use Lux. When I go to user pref, it won’t let me checkmark Lux at all. Is this normal?

11

What is your Blender build number?

12

version 2.55 (sub 0), revision 32738. Release
build date: 2010-10-27, 16:16:32
platform: Windows:32bit

13

Again, LuxBlend25 requires a newer build than the official 2.55 beta, go to graphicall and get a fresh one, or build yourself.

14

Thank you, thank you all! Big bear hug! :smiley:


My Chupa is coming out beautifully so far, but I have a few basic questions:

  1. Why has the camera dollied in so much since I switched from 2.49 to 2.55?
  2. How do I make a second camera active?
  3. Lux’s site doesn’t have a whole lot of materials. Is there a way to make them or do I have to find some online? I need Orc skin (or any kind of similar skin), red LED light with high emission, gums, teeth, and bone… but Lux doesn’t seem to have them yet.

Thank you all for your big help. :slight_smile:

15
  1. 2.49/2.5 differences I guess, move it back.
  2. It’s buried in kinda a funny place: View > Cameras > Set Active Object as Camera
  3. Yeah…the Luxrender mat db…it only works with Blender 2.49 atm, and is in the process of being overhauled. You have to roll your own in the meantime. For what you need:

Red LED: Any mat with emission enabled, set to bright red (emission is under object properties). Glass is best if you want to get technical, but matte might speed things up a hair, and you won’t really see the base matte anyway. If you do go for glass, flip on the architectural option.

Teeth: Glossy mat, fairly shiny, use .75 or so for diffuse color, .25 for specular color. (Don’t use 1.0 for a color in Lux, ever. Except maybe a lamp color)

Bone: Matte, crank up sigma (10-20 or so is a good), adjust color as you like.

Skin and gums…are you using 0.8 dev versions or 0.7.1? 0.8 has a few things that will really help, both for realism and ease of setting up, namely the glossytranslucent mat and volume scattering (aka SSS)