Quote - , and apparently Lux is having troubles with advanced math functions, if nothing else

Actually it does the advanced math really well and automatically - Fresnel reflection equations, for example are automatically used in every shader. In Poser I have to add those myself. In LuxBlend there are dozens of complicated noise pattern generators - Poser only has a few so I often have to build new ones by combining simpler ones.

No, what is missing in Lux are simple math functions for shader building. Add, subtract, divide - these are missing. Obviously the designers have a world view that does not include a user making new kinds of complicated patterns from simple math. They view the world of users as unable to create complexity from simple pieces, so they leave it out, I suppose.

But even though Lux's higher-level texture components are great, they can't produce every pattern needed, and one needs to be able to assemble those. Well, I do anyway.

Traditionally this sort of thing is done by adding more code to the engine, which means it isn't user extensible. I prefer the modular component approach where it is rare to need to add a new kind of component, because practically anything can be built from the existing ones. And they almost have that in Lux. In Poser we have it in spades. And recently DS added the same thing - component (node) based shader assembly instead of coding new modules.

My problem with Lux is not that it isn't component based - it is. But there is a fundamental set of minimum components that have to be there in order to build new kinds of shaders, and these are missing. The interesting thing is that each is different from the existing components by only ONE LINE OF CODE.

For example, they already have a multiply component called "scale". It returns a * b.

Copy/paste and change the name to "add" and then change the expression to a + b. Done.

Do that for:

divide    a / b
pow pow(a, b)
log log(a,b)
exp exp(a, b)

etc. These are not complicated components - they are one line of C++ code.

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