odf, I am out of action on the weekend so that my wife doesn't divorce me, and I have quite a bit of work on Monday and Tuesday, but I will be contributing again at full speed on Wednesday, I hope.

I'm just popping in to give a heads up as to what I'm thinking of doing, so that you can use this information to make wise choices.

Here is the crucial thing to understand: I see enough things wrong with the Luxrender, as-is, that I believe I do not want to use it, and do not want to make an exporter for it. The fact that it does not understand the dichotomy of a closed loop geometry with simultaneously an open loop UV seems a deal breaker to me. I insist that a realism renderer be able to do smoothing at least as well as Poser, not worse.

Second, the lack of straightforward, even trivial, texture manipulation is simply moronic. I do not accept the idea of a "more powerful" renderer that is a step down in features from Firefly.

So - I am planning to (for free) make and maintain an improved Luxrender, one that has all of Lux goodness, plus the goodness of procedural textures and the ability to do organic geometry well instead of poorly. Note that I am not referring to procedural shaders (which allow people to do stupid unrealistic and wrong things with light), but procedural textures (which allow people to do beautiful things with diffuse color, specular color, refraction color, reflection color, transmission color, bump, displacement, and transparency.). This is a subtle difference and it may be lost on some people, but they'll have to trust me that I know what I'm talking about and I could make it clear but do not have time to explain it. I'd rather spend my time building it than explaining it.

While I'm in there messing with the C++, there is absolutely no reason that I should not add the ability to read OBJ format geometry directly. I find it incredibly disingenuous, even perhaps a bit stupid, that an OBJ geometry reader is not built into LuxRender from day 1. The format that was introduced is not superior in any way - quite inferior really.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)