Virtualight > Blender

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I came across this renderer a while back, called Virtualight (http://www.3dvirtualight.com) and it has a lot of great examples of how good it is (that look great). It mentioned a Blender plugin as well, so I downloaded it to try it out…

Unfortunately, I have no clue about scripts and python so I didn’t get it working. I was wondering, has anyone tried it out and if so what was it like?

Chosen1

2

I haven’t tried it,… but I saw some people had fairly cool results with it, though blenders python api needs to expand a bit for full compatibility.

Also virtualight is quite slow.

3

Virtualight works okay with Blender, but there are some problems with the script. Just load the script into a script window in your Blender scene, change the appropriate parameters, and run it. If you read the documentation that came with VL it documents the use of the script. It’s easy, but don’t forget you need python installed, and you have to set the environment path in your autoexec.bat file to run VL. There is also a handy little GUI that comes with VL, although it has a tendency to crash my OS.

C

4

Blender 2.23s API is not ready for export but I think the API in 2.25 is ready. That was one of the new pieces, a new updated API.

5

there weren’t any major changes between the 2.23 and 2.25 Python API. You still can only export Mesh data. However, there might be some stuff that are easier to do in the 2.25 API though, but these things only concern develloppers and not really the end users.

Martin

6

Thanks guys- Tim told me about another renderer called Lightflow, and this looks promising… it’s made in python or something, has python support so it should interface with Blender much better that Virtualight. It also has better caustics.

Anyone have any experience with this?

Chosen1

7

Lightflow is a great renderer, but it is mostly defunct–there’s no further development that I know of. To use it one must install an old, old version of Python, (verson 1.5). Lightflow files are saved as python modules, but that doesn’t make them any easier to use. I’m not sure if LF is fundamentally better than VL, but VL files are, to me, easier to understand–they are more like RIB files, and the documentation is quite complete.

C

8 
The export script is for the "passing" python API of Blender 2.10. One has to add the line

use blender210 as blender
in order for it to work I guess.
Correct me if wrong