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any benefits you're seeing? I'm thinking of upgrading.
50% off too bad for us that paid full price. . Anyhow it's like Paolo says, if we are using Reality none gpu one won't see much difference using 1.2 3 or 4 RC. It's probably more for the gurus that use Blender and such..
(I have not read this entire thread yet, so if this was already addressed, please forgive me.)
I suspect this is the cause of your problems. LuxRender is VERY sensitive to the quality of the IBL. If it has any 'hot' pixels in it, they tend to cause firefly-like issues in the render. The easy fix for this is to change "inifinite" to "infinitesample" where the .lxm file loads the IBL.
Note that fireflies themselves really are pretty much gone. Fireflies are a very specific issue, resulting from numerical instability causing "Not a Number" floating point errors (NaN) during rendering (e.g., dividing by a very small number effectively becomes divide by zero, which is an invalid operation). Lux has long since had updates to catch NaNs and deal gracefully with them.
That's not to say you can't get hot pixels. They're just not fireflies. When you get hot pixels these days, they are usually the result over overly (unphysical) glossy/specular material settings, or as I mentioned above, a problem with IBLs that haven't been properly cleaned up. But the IBL issue is easy to work around.
As a preset, depends on how picky you are on the term 'preset'. Reality lets you edit the light power in the Lights tab. This is because Lux lights have different settings for power than 3Delight. If you save the scene, Reality embeds its changes. I have lots of Studio "scenes" that are really more like presets (mostly for characters I reuse, but also for environment props that I have tweaked for use in LuxRender). Instead of double-clicking something in the content library, I use the Merge option to merge these scenes together, which brings in all the tweaked Reality settings as well. Callad's Reality Lights set uses this same technique -- her 'presets' are really mini saved scenes with embedded Reality configuration data.
The answer is... "it depends". Lux render speed is dependent on many factors, including material settings and volumetrics (e.g., "real glass") used as well as the integrator selected (path vs bidir). 1600x1200 is not terribly large, so you would probably have reasonable results in the long to extreme range for many scene types. Scenes with lots of highly reflective surfaces or a lot of volumes will spill into the epic range. I have done renders at 13,500x9,000 that were sufficiently converged in six to eight days, but I tend to overbake mine so usually let these go for ten or so days. (I am using a dual deca-core Xeon system, though. And for smaller renders, I have a couple slave machines I can also pull in via Lux's native networked rendering support. (The slaves don't have enough RAM for the poster-sized renders -- the 13,500x13,500 render I recently did consumed 40GB of RAM, for example.))
Lux is no speed demon, that's for sure. But I think it gets slagged off a lot more than it deserves.
Also, I posted this before in the Luxus skin thread, but since we now have a Reality thread here at DAZ again, I figured I'd mention it here as well. I did a 'how to' video on using ShaderMap2 to prep normal maps for use in LuxRender. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0uegrj1Ido
Ah, shame... Yes, motion blur. It's useful to create the illusion of movement for things like rotor blades and spinning wheels.
LuxRender does have support for motion blur. However, it's not natively supported by Reality (or Luxus). You can set it up if you are willing to hand-edit the generated scene file. At least for simple transitive motion. Rotational motion would require a LOT more work, since all the geometry in the scene gets exported in world coordinates, where you need local coordinates to do rotation. See the discussion in Blowback (NSFW) for details on how to implement this yourself.
I suspect this is the cause of your problems. LuxRender is VERY sensitive to the quality of the IBL. If it has any 'hot' pixels in it, they tend to cause firefly-like issues in the render. The easy fix for this is to change "inifinite" to "infinitesample" where the .lxm file loads the IBL.
Note that fireflies themselves really are pretty much gone. Fireflies are a very specific issue, resulting from numerical instability causing "Not a Number" floating point errors (NaN) during rendering (e.g., dividing by a very small number effectively becomes divide by zero, which is an invalid operation). Lux has long since had updates to catch NaNs and deal gracefully with them.
That's not to say you can't get hot pixels. They're just not fireflies. When you get hot pixels these days, they are usually the result over overly (unphysical) glossy/specular material settings, or as I mentioned above, a problem with IBLs that haven't been properly cleaned up. But the IBL issue is easy to work around.
Thanks for the education. It just so happens that this morning I started a render with LuxRender (it's been awhile). I didn't know about the "hot pixels" are not "fireflies" and vice versa.
I am using an IBL (Skies of Reality 2) and I have no idea if its IBL has been cleaned as you state. I was seeing the "hot pixels"/"fireflies" and in this render there are no water or high gloss materials. I restarted the render after replacing "infinite" with "infinitesample", let's see if that fixes the issue.
I have several of the DT IBL sets (e.g., Skies, Tera, etc), and some of them do require infinitesample to render correctly.
any benefits you're seeing? I'm thinking of upgrading.
I would not "upgrade." If you want to install it in parallel then you might try it but do not replace your LuxRender 1.3 with 1.4.
This is BETA software. Unless you want to deal with bugs and data corruption you should stay out of it. BETA means:
- Incomplete
- Buggy
- Crashy
- Possible errors in rendering
It's unfortunate that the word "beta" has been interpreted otherwise in the last few years but beta means what I described before. This is not a joke or an exaggeration. If you are not familiar with beta testing then it's best to avoid beta software. In the best case scenario you will gain nothing from LuxRender 1.4. There are no new usable features. See my blog for more details.
Once LuxRender 1.4 is out of beta then we can start talking about using it but, as long as you see the RC suffix, you should avoid it.
Cheers.
ok, good to know. I'll stick with 1.3.1 while someone with far more patience than I can test it out.
I'm in the "bought Reality 1 here and Reality 2 from Paolo's site" group. Should I be seeing my 2 serial number in my account? Will DAZ's site recognize me as an upgrading user once 3 hits?
where is the Luxus skin thread ?
I have a question is reality a good idea for someone who is new at rendering and still learning Daz Studio? I have been thinking about picking it up but I do want to wait for the update before I do.
Should I also list my pc spec's to see if reality is a good idea for me? I do plan to upgrade my processor though. (I believe it is giving me a boodle neck for my pc. Then of course I need to upgrade my motherboard again lol but that is besides the point.)
Yes, it's a fine idea since you will still be learning Daz Studio, the learning curve in Reality is mostly about surface materials on your models (Reality makes estimates on this for you but you can tweak things to customize to your liking) and also how your lights will behave which is very different than 3Delight. LuxRender which is the rendering engine that Reality sends the data to (LuxRender is free btw) uses lights the way they would actually work in nature, 3Delight has a very different way of lighting.
2) No release date has been set for R3 so it could be tomorrow but likely it will be sometime before the end 2014 which still has about 12 weeks left, then again it might now show up for a while later.
3) What do you have now, and what do you plan to upgrade to? What kinds of scenes are you looking to Render and what resolution are you expecting to render at? LuxRender is a intensely CPU and RAM dependent program inside a very small (but powerful) application
Yes, it's a fine idea since you will still be learning Daz Studio, the learning curve in Reality is mostly about surface materials on your models (Reality makes estimates on this for you but you can tweak things to customize to your liking) and also how your lights will behave which is very different than 3Delight. LuxRender which is the rendering engine that Reality sends the data to (LuxRender is free btw) uses lights the way they would actually work in nature, 3Delight has a very different way of lighting.
2) No release date has been set for R3 so it could be tomorrow but likely it will be sometime before the end 2014 which still has about 12 weeks left, then again it might now show up for a while later.
3) What do you have now, and what do you plan to upgrade to? What kinds of scenes are you looking to Render and what resolution are you expecting to render at? LuxRender is a intensely CPU and RAM dependent program inside a very small (but powerful) application
I have a 4th gen Pentium duel core processor G3220. I am thinking of either getting a I3 4th gen duel core with hyper threading or a i5 4th gen quad core. Ram I have 8gb. By the way my graphic's card is a GTX 560 SE.
It can be a great idea because Reality gives you the option to light a scene as you would expect to light it in real life. Since light works differently in Studio/3Delight you can save yourself some frustration by using photographic, real-life, lighting techniques instead of having to learn a lighting system, the one in Studio, that is not rooted in real life.
Reality lighting generally requires a fraction of the lights used in a biased renderer and they are predictable, they act like real lights. Given the low-cost of Reality there is really nothing to lose :)
Thank you for your interest.
I think I'll wait for Reality 2.5 to go on sale again before I buy it. Not sure if you also need Luxus to use it, some of the literature on preta3D seemed to suggest that...
$40 is a little steep for me (something to save up for); Last sale it was down to about 25.
I've seen renders people have done using it as their render engine that look very photo-realistic particularly on skin and cloth/materials in scenes but am wondering what the learning curve is like.
You will need to download the standalone Lux render software yes. Fortunately it's free so there's no extra cost.
As for the learning curve it will depend on how skilled you are using unbiased render engines and how well versed your knowledge of real world lighting setups are. For a total beginner it can be quite a daunting task to get perfect renders but there's plenty of good documentation and videos available to help get you started.
If you're like me and you like to fiddle with dials and switches to see what they do you'll be a pro in no time! Well a pro at fiddling with dials and switches at least... :p
Here's a recent render I did which I figured came out looking quite smexy and I still don't know half the stuff there is to know. Someday I'll be an artist too :/
Edit - Hah, Preta3D beat me to it. :/
You will need to download the standalone Lux render software yes. Fortunately it's free so there's no extra cost.
As for the learning curve it will depend on how skilled you are using unbiased render engines and how well versed your knowledge of real world lighting setups are. For a total beginner it can be quite a daunting task to get perfect renders but there's plenty of good documentation and videos available to help get you started.
If you're like me and you like to fiddle with dials and switches to see what they do you'll be a pro in no time! Well a pro at fiddling with dials and switches at least... :p
Here's a recent render I did which I figured came out looking quite smexy and I still don't know half the stuff there is to know. Someday I'll be an artist too :/
Edit - Hah, Preta3D beat me to it. :/
How new am I to it? Very very new. Lol. I just made my first stand-alone DAZ prop using primitives a few weeks ago (simple glass container using a thin torus set to low opacity with two short cylinders that were scaled to fit and parented to it as lids) and have only been playing around with lighting for a few days now. Getting ready to dive in though! :)
That is a really nice render btw.
...curious, was this a fix to DSON? I can't imagine Genesis/G2 not rendering correctly once loaded in a scene. I know that some have difficulty loading Genesis/G2 into Poser, but again, that shouldn't affect rendering of the figure.
I've rendered G2Fcharacters using the Growing Up morphs and SSS in Reality 2.5/Lux for Daz and they turn out fine.
And that's what I would think too but that is not the case. Genesis/2 figures are loaded in Poser via the DSON plugin, which creates two sets of geometries. If you look closely in the Poser viewport you will see that around the Genesis figure there is an outline of another figure. If you look at the list of materials you will notice that they are duplicated. For example, there is 1_SkinFace and Face for Genesis 2 Female. Very telling is the fact that when you look at the skinning method used for Genesis/2 it's reported to be the old style Poser skinning, instead of the more advanced Unimesh skin. I assume that the DSON plugin re-implements some of the Unimesh skinning algos on its own.
Basically each figure is loaded both as a series of limbs and as a single subdivided mesh that is, I speculate on this, subdivided using OpenSubdiv by the DSON plugin. So, each figure is actually two figures but only one set must be rendered. If you look in the list of bones you will find an object called subd, with internal name __SUBD. That subd mesh is the one to be rendered while all the other bones need to be ignored.
When Reality queries Poser about the geometry it finds two intersecting geometries and that caused problems. Plus there were some other technical issues that needed to be solved.
All that is solved now so we can continue development of other Studio-related features.
Cheers.
...so it; would be kind of like the old Aikobot Maria character which has geometries for both the Aiko3 figure and the individual Robot Parts. I can see where that would be confusing in the geometry query as with Aikobot, there have been times I selected the bone for the "Robot Part" instead of the underlying figure by mistake when posing.
How new am I to it? Very very new. Lol. I just made my first stand-alone DAZ prop using primitives a few weeks ago (simple glass container using a thin torus set to low opacity with two short cylinders that were scaled to fit and parented to it as lids) and have only been playing around with lighting for a few days now. Getting ready to dive in though! :)
That is a really nice render btw.
Direct link to Luxrender http://www.luxrender.net/en_GB/download you need the 1.3 version.
recombinantmicrobe, Reality is the only software that you need to render from Studio using LuxRender. LuxRender is the renderer and is free. It can be downloaded from http://www.luxrender.net/en_GB/download
Cheers.
(adapted from our blog published on 10/17/2014)
Hi.
This is an update on what’s cooking in the Reality lab.
I receive requests, from time to time, on how to download the update that I describe in this blog. These development updates describe what is in current development, not a version that is available. Development means that the software is getting written. The next version of Reality is not finished yet and can’t be downloaded. I’m posting here every week, or so, to let people know what’s to be expected.
In the previous post I mentioned that I was working on adding support for Genesis and Genesis 2 to the Poser edition of Reality. I’m happy to say that now that support is done. Genesis 2 renders beautifully via Reality for Poser and the Automatic Presets work as well.
So, you will be able to use V6, M6, A6 and all the other morphs for Genesis 2 via the DSON plugin and render them via Reality.
That’s pretty much all there is to say. It’s one feature but it took a lot of work to have it done because Genesis/2 is not a Poser native figure and the DSON plugin does some special work on its own. Figuring out what was happening “behind the curtain” took some time.
Cheers.
Perfume Bottle created by fyranuanser
This is what fyranuanser had to say about this marvelous image: This was done with IBL only (Hamarikyu Bridge from HDR Labs, which is in Callad's collection). I used "infinitesample" (edit to .lxm) and "Memory Conservative" (in Reality) after Cwichura's recommendations. They made a big difference, as I did some tests without them for comparison. The render took about 90 min (8 core i7 2600K at 3.4 GHz).
I love it! :) Most excellent.
...nice refraction.
Mustang created by pciccone You can find more of his images in the Pret-a-3D images in the Daz Gallery.
How new am I to it? Very very new. Lol. I just made my first stand-alone DAZ prop using primitives a few weeks ago (simple glass container using a thin torus set to low opacity with two short cylinders that were scaled to fit and parented to it as lids) and have only been playing around with lighting for a few days now. Getting ready to dive in though! :)
That is a really nice render btw.
Direct link to Luxrender http://www.luxrender.net/en_GB/download you need the 1.3 version.
Ty!