LuxusCore Carrara

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Comments

  • JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
    edited December 1969

    Is there a way to just use a spot, bulb or mesh light instead of the luxcore sky or infinite?

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited January 2015

    joeping said:
    Is there a way to just use a spot, bulb or mesh light instead of the luxcore sky or infinite?

    Carrara's own spot, bulb, and distant lights are currently translated into luxcore. Although it looks like it is not responding to changes during an IPR render. You will have to stop and start the render to reflect changes.

    Mesh lights have to be done via the luxcore materials and work great. Make anything a LuxCore Matte material and turn up the power on the Emission channel. Here is a screenshot. As a heads up if you make a plane and make it emit, it will emit out of one side of the plane, not both.

    emit.png
    1920 x 1032 - 392K
    Post edited by SphericLabs on
  • mmoirmmoir Posts: 821
    edited December 1969

    Hey guys,
    I did update my AMD HD radeon 7570 graphics card to test LuxCore with and I do have a question about the update. Now when I display the properties of my graphics card it says "AMD HD radeon 7500 series" where did the 7570 go. Is this normat, I have never had the graphics card renamed after an update. I am sure I selected the correct driver.

    Anyways, I tested some animation with LuxCore and it works but it is not near as fast as using Carraras Global Illumination+Skylite option. SphericLabs, what is the best Config settings to use with my graphics card?

    Here is a simple video showing an animated bounce , I had it at 2 secs per frame.
    Thanks

    http://youtu.be/HEEs8o5xPhw

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    mmoir said:
    Hey guys,
    I did update my AMD HD radeon 7570 graphics card to test LuxCore with and I do have a question about the update. Now when I display the properties of my graphics card it says "AMD HD radeon 7500 series" where did the 7570 go. Is this normat, I have never had the graphics card renamed after an update. I am sure I selected the correct driver.

    Anyways, I tested some animation with LuxCore and it works but it is not near as fast as using Carraras Global Illumination+Skylite option. SphericLabs, what is the best Config settings to use with my graphics card?

    Here is a simple video showing an animated bounce , I had it at 2 secs per frame.
    Thanks

    http://youtu.be/HEEs8o5xPhw

    The video is fun.

    Regarding Carrara speed, Carrara is a very fast renderer and it scales(meaning it gets faster with more cores) really well.

    I myself am still learning about LuxCore. The thing to do is to give you all a much better way to configure LuxCore and then you could probably tell me. It would help us figure out how to optimize things for LuxCore and play to its strengths.

  • eyeseeeyesee Posts: 172
    edited December 1969

    I don't believe it ! Bad Santa didn't forget me after all ! And judging by this present I've been a very, very bad lad this year :lol:
    The rest of the year can only be down hill from here.

    This is what I've been looking for, a hardware accelerated renderer that's not dependant on your graphic cards memory size.

    O.K. here's my wallet, and have my credit card. Where do I sign up? I could kiss you SphericLabs :roll:... In a manly way of course.

    Some questions:

    Is there a timetable for going live?

    Is there a list of render parameters and their values?


    Eyesee(Jedi Tea Master - Having a celebratory pint... of tea of course!)

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    eyesee said:
    I don't believe it ! Bad Santa didn't forget me after all ! And judging by this present I've been a very, very bad lad this year :lol:
    The rest of the year can only be down hill from here.

    This is what I've been looking for, a hardware accelerated renderer that's not dependant on your graphic cards memory size.

    O.K. here's my wallet, and have my credit card. Where do I sign up? I could kiss you SphericLabs :roll:... In a manly way of course.

    Some questions:

    Is there a timetable for going live?

    Is there a list of render parameters and their values?


    Eyesee(Jedi Tea Master - Having a celebratory pint... of tea of course!)

    Thank you for the kinds words, but actually the GPU rendering is dependant on graphics memory size. The render parameters will be forthcoming.

  • Design AcrobatDesign Acrobat Posts: 459
    edited December 1969

    did a test render of a Genesis figure - This is a snapshot of the Luxus render screen not a rendered final rendered image. Still haven't figured out how to convert textures in luxus.

    genesis_luxus_ss.jpg
    794 x 590 - 47K
  • chickenmanchickenman Posts: 1,202
    edited January 2015

    I thought I would give it a try
    So I used the figures from the Nov/Dec challenge with a Luxcore sun/sky light
    render specs [Elapsed time: 19 sec][Samples 89][Avg. samples/sec 1.38M on 641.3K tris]
    It always seems to use my CPU to render I have tried what was suggested Eiarlier to no avail.

    I also included a Carrara native render and you can tell the difference with the hair as it dropped the Carrara hair and went for the shader beneath

    And the last one is a luxrender through luxus which also only used my CPU to render for the same 19 seconds.

    Here are the computer specs It is also liquid cooled so runs cool.\Operating System
    Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit
    CPU
    Intel Core i7 4790K @ 4.00GHz 22 °C

    RAM
    16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-9-24)
    Motherboard
    Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z97X-UD3H-CF (SOCKET 0) 28 °C
    Graphics
    TOSHIBA-TV (1920x1080@60Hz)
    4096MB ATI AMD Radeon R7 200 Series (Sapphire/PCPartner) 23 °C

    luxout.png
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    Comparison_with_luxcore_test_1.jpg
    640 x 480 - 18K
    Luxcore_test_1.jpg
    640 x 480 - 129K
    Post edited by chickenman on
  • DustRiderDustRider Posts: 2,744
    edited December 1969

    Sorry I disappeared for a while, RL sort of took over (an may continue to do so for a while). But I did get a bit of time to work with the new version of the plugin tonight.

    One strange issue I found is that i can't get any of my old projects from the previous version to render with OCL. They render fine with CPU, but trying to use OCL will either crash Carrara, or end up with a blank (black) render, running at 0.0M s/s. I can start a new seen and everything works as expected. Another issue I noticed with this version is that load/refresh times seem quite long now with either the IPR or in the render room.

    Also, sometimes changes to the scene either aren't reflected in the IPR, sometimes the IPR restarts without the changes showing up, sometimes the IPR doesn't restart. This happens somewhat randomly when adding/deleting/turning off/on items, when modifying shaders, or when morphing objects like hair/clothing on G2F).

    I'm guessing that no additional work has been done on trying to automatically assign the GPU on systems with and active Intel 4xxx GPU and a dedicated GPU card since with no values in the "config settings" window the render runs at about half the speed of CPU only, and maxes out the CPU, with no activity on the GPU.

    Otherwise, so far things seem to be working well, and I'm enjoying working with it quite a bit.

  • DADA_universeDADA_universe Posts: 336
    edited December 1969

    I might have a bug here. Objects from Carrara's browser tray do not seem to play too well with Luxcore, it's either the textures don't translate at all (as has proven to be the case everytime with terrains) and refuse to respond in any logical way to anything done in the shader room to remedy that) or the objects just don't render at all, sometimes only small parts of the objects show up in the render. Had the same problem with 3d text generated in Carrara in one project, but in another project it translated fine, so the problem for 3d text might be font specific or something. If any of these have been explained away in previous threads, please forgive as I've only started working at catching up with Luxus with this Luxcore offering.

    Plus PATHOCL still crashes the PC big time.

    Many thanks.

    Sorry to trouble you SphericLabs, just nudging this a little to see if you have any thoughts on this issue with items bundled with Carrara not appearing in LuxCore renders. Apparently Eyos has the same issues. Cheers.

    p.s. the alternatives to the accelerator type in the config settings you suggested in a previous post in response to Eyos have made no difference at my end.

  • eyeseeeyesee Posts: 172
    edited December 1969

    Dustrider,

    sometimes changes to the scene either aren’t reflected in the IPR


    I found that if you close IPR before loading any new objects, then the shaders are updated and IPR picks up the change when your restart it.

    I 've also found that IPR gives an allocation failure if I load too many things. For instance V6 with casual clothes and bus stop background. Fine until I loaded the bus stop and then, strangely, it used up all available 14 GB of PC memory(not Graphics Card) before failing? But then I'm a noobe at this and it's probably operator error.

    Eyesee(Jedi Tea Master - My cup's empty :shut: !!! Time for a refill. )

  • DustRiderDustRider Posts: 2,744
    edited December 1969

    eyesee said:
    Dustrider,

    sometimes changes to the scene either aren’t reflected in the IPR


    I found that if you close IPR before loading any new objects, then the shaders are updated and IPR picks up the change when your restart it.

    I 've also found that IPR gives an allocation failure if I load too many things. For instance V6 with casual clothes and bus stop background. Fine until I loaded the bus stop and then, strangely, it used up all available 14 GB of PC memory(not Graphics Card) before failing? But then I'm a noobe at this and it's probably operator error.

    Eyesee(Jedi Tea Master - My cup's empty :shut: !!! Time for a refill. )
    Thanks Eyesee!

    I guess I should have added in my earlier post that I can usually force an update to the IPR by stopping the render then starting again. But sometimes I have to do as you suggest and completely close the IPR then re-open it, and everything will be updated.

  • JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
    edited December 1969

    Thanks for the tips SphericLabs,
    I was able to use a mesh light in LuxusCore Carrara for this experiment.

    See the animation on YouTube at http://youtu.be/PiTN11pgE6k
    This is another test of LuxusCore Carrara and Carrara 8.5 Pro's animation rendering capabilities. It is rendered at 30 seconds per frame at 1280 X 720. This time I used an imported aniblock on a Genesis 2 figure with Wildenlander HD for Genesis 2 Male and Opus Magnum as the background.

    luxuscore_carrara_animation_test_05.jpg
    633 x 573 - 171K
  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    dustrider said:
    Sorry I disappeared for a while, RL sort of took over (an may continue to do so for a while). But I did get a bit of time to work with the new version of the plugin tonight.

    One strange issue I found is that i can't get any of my old projects from the previous version to render with OCL. They render fine with CPU, but trying to use OCL will either crash Carrara, or end up with a blank (black) render, running at 0.0M s/s. I can start a new seen and everything works as expected. Another issue I noticed with this version is that load/refresh times seem quite long now with either the IPR or in the render room.

    Also, sometimes changes to the scene either aren't reflected in the IPR, sometimes the IPR restarts without the changes showing up, sometimes the IPR doesn't restart. This happens somewhat randomly when adding/deleting/turning off/on items, when modifying shaders, or when morphing objects like hair/clothing on G2F).

    I'm guessing that no additional work has been done on trying to automatically assign the GPU on systems with and active Intel 4xxx GPU and a dedicated GPU card since with no values in the "config settings" window the render runs at about half the speed of CPU only, and maxes out the CPU, with no activity on the GPU.

    Otherwise, so far things seem to be working well, and I'm enjoying working with it quite a bit.

    Weird about the old projects. Is there anything in the "config settings" in these old projects?

    Adding or deleting anything will cause what you describe, restart of IPR but no real changes. Except adding a light does work.

    No additional work on GPU config. I am working on a dialog to let users choose.

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    I might have a bug here. Objects from Carrara's browser tray do not seem to play too well with Luxcore, it's either the textures don't translate at all (as has proven to be the case everytime with terrains) and refuse to respond in any logical way to anything done in the shader room to remedy that) or the objects just don't render at all, sometimes only small parts of the objects show up in the render. Had the same problem with 3d text generated in Carrara in one project, but in another project it translated fine, so the problem for 3d text might be font specific or something. If any of these have been explained away in previous threads, please forgive as I've only started working at catching up with Luxus with this Luxcore offering.

    Plus PATHOCL still crashes the PC big time.

    Many thanks.

    Sorry to trouble you SphericLabs, just nudging this a little to see if you have any thoughts on this issue with items bundled with Carrara not appearing in LuxCore renders. Apparently Eyos has the same issues. Cheers.

    p.s. the alternatives to the accelerator type in the config settings you suggested in a previous post in response to Eyos have made no difference at my end.

    Translation of Carrara shaders is certainly limited. Right now it simply looks at the values of the standard multichanel shader and does a guess. It can certainly be improved. Also, internally saved textures will not work at all at this time.

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    eyesee said:
    Dustrider,

    sometimes changes to the scene either aren’t reflected in the IPR


    I found that if you close IPR before loading any new objects, then the shaders are updated and IPR picks up the change when your restart it.

    I 've also found that IPR gives an allocation failure if I load too many things. For instance V6 with casual clothes and bus stop background. Fine until I loaded the bus stop and then, strangely, it used up all available 14 GB of PC memory(not Graphics Card) before failing? But then I'm a noobe at this and it's probably operator error.

    Eyesee(Jedi Tea Master - My cup's empty :shut: !!! Time for a refill. )

    running out of GPU memory is probably what is going on here. I think we need some sort of indicator so people know how much they are using. Closing other application that use GPU memory will help.

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    joeping said:
    Thanks for the tips SphericLabs,
    I was able to use a mesh light in LuxusCore Carrara for this experiment.

    See the animation on YouTube at http://youtu.be/PiTN11pgE6k
    This is another test of LuxusCore Carrara and Carrara 8.5 Pro's animation rendering capabilities. It is rendered at 30 seconds per frame at 1280 X 720. This time I used an imported aniblock on a Genesis 2 figure with Wildenlander HD for Genesis 2 Male and Opus Magnum as the background.

    Very cool joeping, 3 weeks ago I would not have believed Lux could do animation in a reasonable amount o time.

  • JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
    edited January 2015

    joeping said:
    Thanks for the tips SphericLabs,
    I was able to use a mesh light in LuxusCore Carrara for this experiment.

    See the animation on YouTube at http://youtu.be/PiTN11pgE6k
    This is another test of LuxusCore Carrara and Carrara 8.5 Pro's animation rendering capabilities. It is rendered at 30 seconds per frame at 1280 X 720. This time I used an imported aniblock on a Genesis 2 figure with Wildenlander HD for Genesis 2 Male and Opus Magnum as the background.

    Very cool joeping, 3 weeks ago I would not have believed Lux could do animation in a reasonable amount o time.

    Thanks SphericLabs,
    I didn't think that it was possible either.
    I had been trying animation with LUX, but the problems were getting me down. That's why I have been so spazzed to try these experiments.

    I've learned a ton from these few experiments.

    The config settings that work best for me are:
    renderengine.type = PATHCPU
    batch.halttime = 30
    sampler.type = SOBOL

    I use "batch.halttime = 1" to preview the animation before final renders.
    At first I was not getting DAZ shaders to transfer, then after the last build they seemed to work.
    Some native shaders don't work if the use blends.
    Some Luxcore shaders give me errors.
    I can't seem to adjust the light intensity I have to use the distance to adjust it.
    Multiple lights slow the render way down.
    Can't use Carrara hair objects, plants objects or terrain shaders (I never could with LUX)
    Particles work if they are objects.
    Replicator works without having to convert them to instances.
    DAZ shaders come in to shiny, (but I have that problem in regular Carrara too)

    These are just the main observations so far. There are problems, but it works far better than I expected.

    Thanks for making dreams come true.

    Post edited by Joepingleton on
  • JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
    edited January 2015

    I forgot to mention the strange things that happened in the "sneak" experiment. Some of the frames seem to be flickering when there is no change in the time line and sometime a frame would be black. When I re-rendered the frames individually they would be fine. This was the first time I experienced both these errors. Probably a CPU memory issue.

    Post edited by Joepingleton on
  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,578
    edited December 1969

    joeping said:
    Thanks for the tips SphericLabs,
    I was able to use a mesh light in LuxusCore Carrara for this experiment.

    See the animation on YouTube at http://youtu.be/PiTN11pgE6k
    This is another test of LuxusCore Carrara and Carrara 8.5 Pro's animation rendering capabilities. It is rendered at 30 seconds per frame at 1280 X 720. This time I used an imported aniblock on a Genesis 2 figure with Wildenlander HD for Genesis 2 Male and Opus Magnum as the background.

    Yikes, is that ever cool! :)
  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,578
    edited December 1969

    joeping said:
    I forgot to mention the strange things that happened in the "sneak" experiment. Some of the frames seem to be flickering when there is no change in the time line and sometime a frame would be black. When I re-rendered the frames individually they would be fine. This was the first time I experienced both these errors. Probably a GPU memory issue.
    But if you're using PATH=CPU, aren't you effectively bypassing your GPU?
    Sorry... I have been away from the internet except for short stints here and there... never even caught what this is all about... looks like I need to find yet some more time so I can read this thread... figure out what LuxCore is all about! ;)
  • JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
    edited December 1969

    oops I meant CPU ;)

  • DADA_universeDADA_universe Posts: 336
    edited December 1969

    I might have a bug here. Objects from Carrara's browser tray do not seem to play too well with Luxcore, it's either the textures don't translate at all (as has proven to be the case everytime with terrains) and refuse to respond in any logical way to anything done in the shader room to remedy that) or the objects just don't render at all, sometimes only small parts of the objects show up in the render. Had the same problem with 3d text generated in Carrara in one project, but in another project it translated fine, so the problem for 3d text might be font specific or something. If any of these have been explained away in previous threads, please forgive as I've only started working at catching up with Luxus with this Luxcore offering.

    Plus PATHOCL still crashes the PC big time.

    Many thanks.

    Sorry to trouble you SphericLabs, just nudging this a little to see if you have any thoughts on this issue with items bundled with Carrara not appearing in LuxCore renders. Apparently Eyos has the same issues. Cheers.

    p.s. the alternatives to the accelerator type in the config settings you suggested in a previous post in response to Eyos have made no difference at my end.

    Translation of Carrara shaders is certainly limited. Right now it simply looks at the values of the standard multichanel shader and does a guess. It can certainly be improved. Also, internally saved textures will not work at all at this time.

    Thanks for the update SphericLabs. Will keep testing, at least the current limitations are kind of clear for now.

  • DADA_universeDADA_universe Posts: 336
    edited December 1969

    @ SphericLabs, not being a developer, I don't know what information might be most useful to you, but I'll just shoot the breeze hoping something in all this gives a clue. I worked on a character, adjusting the skin settings to work with Luxcore materials using Jonstark's settings as a starting point. Then I saved the skin shader by dragging it to the browser so I could apply it anytime I wanted to do a Luxcore render of that character. Carrara reacts badly when I try to apply the shader to the same character in a new scene, it becomes unresponsive and I would have to abort. With another character saved to my Carrara browser (with original Carrara skin textures), when I load the character and convert 1 distant light to the LuxCore sun light without any changes to the character's shader, the resultant render is just a silhouette of the character in red splotches.

  • eyeseeeyesee Posts: 172
    edited December 1969

    SphericLabs,

    With OpenCL, if you have multiple graphics cards, does it make use of the total memory in all cards?
    or is there a restriction, like only the size of the card with the smallest amount of memory (seem to remember that being a GPU rendering limitation at one point, might have been CUDA though)

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    eyesee said:
    SphericLabs,

    With OpenCL, if you have multiple graphics cards, does it make use of the total memory in all cards?
    or is there a restriction, like only the size of the card with the smallest amount of memory (seem to remember that being a GPU rendering limitation at one point, might have been CUDA though)


    Each graphics card needs its own copy of data to render. So if you have a 2GB card and a 4GB card, then you are limited to 2GB if you want to render with both.
  • wavyeyewavyeye Posts: 18
    edited December 1969

    This is good stuff, it feels really nice to use Lux in Carrara and the IPR certainly takes away the chore of fixing shaders.

    I have a question however.

    How do you set the camera?
    As in Exposure, White Balance, Depth of Field and Tone Mapping.

    Thanks.

  • eyeseeeyesee Posts: 172
    edited December 1969

    SphericLabs,


    Each graphics card needs its own copy of data to render. So if you have a 2GB card and a 4GB card, then you are limited to 2GB if you want to render with both.

    Isn't that going to make your indicator harder to code, as you'll need to know what cards are installed and which has the least amount of memory? :ohh:

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    This is good stuff, it feels really nice to use Lux in Carrara and the IPR certainly takes away the chore of fixing shaders.

    I have a question however.

    How do you set the camera?
    As in Exposure, White Balance, Depth of Field and Tone Mapping.

    Thanks.

    It can be done via the config settings, DOF would be via the scene settings. I need to get the parameters exposed in a nice UI.

  • SphericLabsSphericLabs Posts: 598
    edited December 1969

    eyesee said:
    SphericLabs,


    Each graphics card needs its own copy of data to render. So if you have a 2GB card and a 4GB card, then you are limited to 2GB if you want to render with both.

    Isn't that going to make your indicator harder to code, as you'll need to know what cards are installed and which has the least amount of memory? :ohh:

    yep.

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