joking right?

its a  gui for the lux render.

@lucifer: Well, I was hoping that I would be able to run the GUI natively under Linux, actually.

Everything worked fine there, once I had changed the backslashes in uiCommands.bbml into slashes, like bagginsbill advised. For some reason, the AIR installer creates all files with root as the owner, but the application itself did not seem to mind that I changed that and repossessed them to my normal account.

If you're wondering if I'm crazy to implement a subdivision algorithm in Python within the exporter, have a look at the images I posted on page 24 (second post from the top).

Quote - joking right?

its a  gui for the lux render.

And there was me thinking it was going to be part of Poser 9 or Poser Pro 2012.:tt2:

can i go a little oftopic please?

i found today that there isn n open source similar software to renderman. its called Pixie. its supports almost everything that renderman does.

could we do something similar for Pixie like you are doing with luxrender? because Pixie has very fast displacement,subsurface scattering,point based color bleeding and poitnt based glossy reflection .

Quote - Oh good grief BB...

I'm afraid I'm still learning Icelandic, but after that I'll learn Matmatic, I promise...lmao.

Laurie

You need help with the Icelandic Laurie?

Ég skal hjálpa þér.  Ekkert mál.  Láttu mig bara vita hvað þig vantar og við reddum því, ókei?

Seriously, no problem at all ;)

your hovercraft is full of eels?

Quote - > Quote - Oh good grief BB...

I'm afraid I'm still learning Icelandic, but after that I'll learn Matmatic, I promise...lmao.

Laurie

You need help with the Icelandic Laurie?

Ég skal hjálpa þér.  Ekkert mál.  Láttu mig bara vita hvað þig vantar og við reddum því, ókei?

Seriously, no problem at all ;)

uh, I was joking....lol. I've heard somewhere that Icelandic is one of the hardest languages to learn on the planet....lmao. So, being the sarcastic ass that I am, I was being facetious once again...hehe ;o).

Thanks for the offer though. But none of that looks like anything my mouth is capable of pronouncing...lol.

Laurie

 Hehe, yeah I kinda thought you were joking.  Icelandic has some ridiculous grammar rules and should not be learnt by anyone unless extremely necessary ;)  But to keep in character with the OP here's an Icelandic word to describe this thread:

"FRABAERT!!"    meaning EXCELLENT or FANTASTIC!!

I´m trying out the LuxExporter now and I´m using the files from PoserLuxExporter_alpha_1-7.zip.  Is that the latest update so far?   Am I I right to understand that proper light conversion has not been implemented yet?

Love what you guys have come up with in such a short time and can't to see what follows.

How do you control the render size?

Lux is using Poser's rendering dimensions.  If you change it in Poser, and then export, Lux will render to the new dimensions.

Quote -  
Here's my first test.  This is after 1 hour 25 min. render time and I'm quite happy with the results. 

Nice image!

Quote -
How do you control the render size?

Open file "PoserLuxExporter.py". Search for line 99 or text "scene.OutputRes()".

Here the script tries to get information from Poser about rendersize. You may overwrite " scene.OutputRes()" with something like (800,600) (x-/y-size).

Sorry, what I wrote may be not clear enough. Replace scene.OutputRes() with (800,600)

Tried AIR with Linux/Wine:

Thank you.

Selected file is I:DesktopWeb DownloadsLuxPoseUI_0.1.2LuxPoseuiMain.bbml

Loading will begin in 5 seconds.

Loading will begin in 4 seconds.

Loading will begin in 3 seconds.

Loading will begin in 2 seconds.

Loading will begin in 1 second.

--------- FATAL ERROR -------------

Unknown command:

appwindow  

Quote - All I'm saying is that there may be corner cases (no pun intended) where some manual tweaking will be necessary for optimal results. I'm sure we'll find some good strategies that will work most of the time, though. For example, if you're rendering an urban scene with lots of architecture and other background objects, you could turn all smoothing (per-vertex normals as well as polygon subdivision) off by default and only activate it selectively for a few foreground figures and objects if you find that they have problems with their shading.

That would be a lot of work: Imagine a Stonemason scenery (huge, very detailed, often lots of props, sharp and smoothed edges everywhere), with a couple organics running around in it (all with clothes, hair, and so on). Editing this, item by item, would be very tedious, especially if you need to let it render for 5-10 minutes to get an idea what needs (more) tweaking and what not..

Quote - Or you could let the exporter guess and make a correction or two if it guesses wrong.

I vote for that (you might have guessed by now...), the exporter must to be able to guess right most of the time, and only need manual editing in special cases, like when the model has smoothing problems to start with, or is too complicated. Poser does manage to guess what to smooth and what not, this information should be used and translated.

Quote - For some reason, the AIR installer creates all files with root as the owner

Because it is installed as root?

On Windows that's the problem: You can only install AIR stuff as administrator, which means that all folders and files created by the installation belong to the administrator; If you go back to an unprivileged account to run it, the app runs just fine, but apparently it can't write anything in its own folders...

(Yet another reason not to install as administrator... )

Anyway, to make this work in Windows for those who don't work as administrators, they need to change the owner, or change access of the created directory to writable by all (or at least your usual work user). Something else to add in the readme.

Quote - Here's my first test.  This is after 1 hour 25 min. render time and I'm quite happy with the results.

Looks great; But for more realistic light try a real Lux "sun" light instead of the pointlight:
Edit the .lxo file in notepad and delete the light (on top, pretty obvious, it's well commented), then open the .lxs file and insert after WorldBegin:

AttributeBegin<br></br>
LightSource "sunsky" "integer nsamples" [1]<br></br>
           
"vector sundir" [0.70000 0.400000 0.700000]<br></br>
        "color L" [1.000000
1.000000 1.000000]<br></br>
        "float turbidity"
[2.000000]<br></br>
        "float aconst"
[0.500000] "float bconst" [0.500000] "float
cconst" [1.000000] "float dconst" [1.000000]
"float econst" [1.000000]<br></br>
        "float relsize"
[2.000000]<br></br>
AttributeEnd

Insert empty lines if you want to separate the rest.
As you might have guessed, "vector sundir" determines where the sun is in the sky. The "float" parts control haze, but you won't see any in your scene anyway.

Import the edited file to Lux like usual and let it render. It adds a real "sun" and a "sky" light, I'm absolutely in love with this feature...

 Okay wow!  Thanks for the info.  I'll try it out.

That would be the result of picking Main.bbml instead of what it asked you to find. grin

This astonishes me. Three times it tells you want it wants. grin

This is why I don't want to sell software. The support issues ... ugh.

 I used did what the window told me: It should be ... under "ui"

There was none. And yes, I didn't look under "data". Because data does not imply UI.

But fine, found it in data and it works for me with AIR as a windows app under Linux/Wine. I know there is a native AIR package for Linux, but I don't want to hurt my lovely Linux with closed source ;)

That did throw me for a bit.  I wasn't sure if it was worth mentioning, though, since it will eventually find the file on its own.  Oopses.   

No - the uiCommands.bbml is not ui, it is data. It will be produced by the script before launching the ui.

The ui folder is only to hold the user interface specification.

The data that the program operates on includes stuff that the script has to produce. This is scene data, as well as metadata about what are the legal choices. If you look in the metadata.bbml file you'll see that it lists what the legal values are of the various parameters. This will be generated by the exporter script, before launching the UI. In this way, the UI will not have to change just because in LuxRender 0.8 or whatever there is a new sampler or integrator or accelerator.

The uiCommand.bbml lists all this information - where to read metadata, where to read the scene data, where to write the user's choices, and which actual UI to run. At the moment, there is only one ui, but there can be many different dialogs, any one of which can be launched by the Python code.

The truth is that the initial command file, currently uiCommands.bbml, will actually be dynamically generated by the Python code, and the Python code can write this data anywhere it wants. Furthermore, there does not have to be a uiCommands.bbml file at all. Everything that is in that file is also accepted as command line arguments when the script is launched.

For this first trial, I don't have a Python program to launch the UI, so I hard-coded the initial commands in uiCommands.bbml. It does NOT belong in the ui folder. The ui folder is only for the source code to the ui.

This is also why I added support for zip files. In the final shipping version, there will not be a ui folder. Instead, there will be a zip archive containing all of the UI specificaiton. This will prevent users carelessly messing around with those files, as they will not be present in source form. Further, it will be easy to update the ui specification - it will simply be a zip file that does not need to be unzipped.

My plan is to keep the ui folder as a zipped file on a server. The ui, when it launches, can be configured to check for an updated version. If there is one, it can automatically download the zip file and then begin using it. There will be no need for any complicated steps to update the ui files.

 I have a pesky little question:  Will we see a linked GUI within the next several hours or will it be a longer wait? ;)

I'm working on an import hack one can use until there is something other.  

I have found some interesting things using this exporter and Lux.  This is most likely a Lux problem, but I'll mention it here.

I was rendering a pic, then saved the flm to continue later.  The pic at the time was very good, with just a little more time needed.  When I loaded the flm to continue, I get nothing but 'fireflies'.  It makes it unusable. 

So, I decided just to start from scratch and load the original and start from the beginning.  Now, Lux won't load all of the textures. 

Did you restart Lux before you tried to continue? My experience is Lux isn't so stable.

I have the "dataOut.bbml" read in to a Python dictionary now. 
Next I have to do is storing the parameters into Lux files.

Stand by for a while :)

Quote - Did you restart Lux before you tried to continue? My experience is Lux isn't so stable.

Yes, I had restarted Lux.  i ended up going back into Poser and re-exporting it and now it is rendering again correctly. 

The scene is Stonemason's Warehouse by the way.

Hm. Such a [censored] after 12 hours?  Maybe it has something to do with light-settings.

I get the same a lot of the time. I know an unbiased renderer has to have a lot of samples, but I think there's something wrong with LuxRender. It just doesn't seem logical that after 50 or more samples, you'd still have really strong fireflies. There's one in there just to the right of the brown barrel that looks like it is only one sample.

Perhaps the metropolis sampler is broken. Is it possible it does not make any attempt to evenly distribute samples? It would seem to be a trivial matter to notice that a pixel has not gotten much attention and is wildly different from its neighbors and so it should get a little more attention for a while.

I also thought that it would be cool if in the Lux UI you could click on a spot or sweep out an area and it would do a little extra area rendering there for a while before going back to the image as a whole. With a human watching and directing its attention here and there, it should be possible to do better than the random stuff it seems to be doing.

 I don't see how it can be the light, the values I used for the sunsky are pretty close to the defaults.

Could it be the interior of the warehouse? Maybe the render time goes extreme because the algorithm has to spend a lot of time calculating ray bounces inside the warehouse.

I think you need to use a portal if you didn't already. LuxRender needs them for interior scenes with outside light sources for efficiency.

http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/index.php?title=Portals

Kevin

I am assuming that there isn't any GUI for assigning materials, such as the portal material.

Actually, after reading from the website, I gather that is one of the functions that any exporter has to provide.

 Not yet anyway.
Does anybody know how I could go about manually defining a portal?

Put a rectangle in your scene where you want the portal. A Poser one-sided square will do.

Name it Portal_1 or something. If you need others, make more.

Export.

Open the lxm file. There will be materials for Portal_x. Change those into the LuxRender "portal" material - whatever that is.

Thanks BB, that sounds quite doable actually. :)
Will give it a try after work and see if it makes a difference in speed.

Is there a detailed spec for the .lx? files anywhere? Or are you guys just reverse engineering what other lux exporters do?
The information on the Luxrender wiki is all very high level.

This:

http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/index.php?title=Scene_file_format

is pretty much the only documentation I've found on the specifics of the scene file elements.

It's not good enough to fully understand or exploit everything.

I do not have any other exporters to look at what they do. I dl'd the new Blender but I still couldn't understand it, and I could not figure out how to install LuxBlend. They simply don't explain it anywhere. So I gave up on that. If I can guess/test how something works in 10 minutes, then spending 6 hours trying to install LuxBlend is wasteful.

At this point, I know how to do many things in the .lx format, but I have not run into the portal material yet. If you figure it out and can explain it in a paragraph, I'll be sure to hook it up into the material converter quickly. I'm assuming it would be sufficient to treat any object who's name is LuxPortal as a portal. That would make it trivial.

Quote - So, I decided just to start from scratch and load the original and start from the beginning.  Now, Lux won't load all of the textures.

Strange, I've restarted renders from initial files after rendering a lot of times (to test different light/renderer settings), and it always worked just fine. I guess it's a Lux bug.

I found another Lux Heisenbug: The "copy to clipboard" feature doesn't always copy something valid, or at least something PSP would accept as being valid.

Quote - This is a test using only a SunSky light, added it into the .lxs file by hand and deleted the other lights from the .lxo file. It's been rendering for 12 hours overnight and I'll leave it to render today while I'm at work.

Is the original rendered picture huge?

I've rendered the exact same Warehouse with an exact same edited "sun" light, and after 3 hours it was clean. But since I forgot to specify a size, it rendered at Posers default render size (490x500).

http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/index.php?title=Scene_file_format

This has been pretty helpful to me.  It doesn't mention portals, though.  I saw that somewhere else, I'd have to find it again.  I remember it saying you needed to use PORTAL in all-caps for it to recognize it as such. 

Quote - Perhaps the metropolis sampler is broken. Is it possible it does not make any attempt to evenly distribute samples?

I wouldn't exclude it.  I was wondering, watching the render, why some white dots resisted so long, long after the rest of the picture was almost good. Lets say, improvement isn't very evenly distributed.

 Yes, I found that "Scene file format" page yesterday, it's useful but limited, nothing in there about portals.

I came across 1 note in the XSI exporter wiki page to add PORTAL to a material to change it into a portal, not sure if that was meant literal though or just as a placeholder..

 This also looks quite a good detailed thread on advanced settings, www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php

Here's a tute showing how to set up a portal

http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/index.php?title=LuxBlend_tutorial:_creating_a_simple_interior_scene

Portal Details near the bottom of the page.

Kevin

First version with GUI parameters. Not mutch parameters are included yet. Have to explore which format Lux needs for the parameters.

Would be nice if a parameter is defined in the GUI an entry with what to write out to Lux could be included. Some parameters in the GUI have uppercase letters, Lux accepts only lowercase. Took me a while to find out ...

I've added a folder named AIR with bagginsbills GUI.  If you start the GUI for the first time, click "LuxPose.air" in folder AIR from where you've unzipped the new package to.

YOU HAVE TO INSTALL AIR FROM ADOBE TO BE ABLE TO USE THE HUI if you not already did (see bagginsbills instructions above).

Another findout: I wondered why some spot-light where ignored. Seems that "Angle End" for a light in Poser has to be changed to a higher value than 70 (default). I raised it to 160 and my light was working.

Download last version as usual: http://www.poserprofis.de/PoserLuxExporter_Alpha

Quote - First version with GUI parameters. Not mutch parameters are included yet. Have to explore which format Lux needs for the parameters.

If that helps, there is a big package with Lux test scenes in their mercurial, that's where I found the syntax for tweaking the exporter files.

Quote - Another findout: I wondered why some spot-light where ignored. Seems that "Angle End" for a light in Poser has to be changed to a higher value than 70 (default). I raised it to 160 and my light was working.

So you're saying you can't make any narrow spotlights? Now that's a limitation...
(BTW the lights which didn't work for me were infinite ones)

Quote - can i go a little oftopic please?

i found today that there isn n open source similar software to renderman. its called Pixie. its supports almost everything that renderman does.

  could we do something similar for Pixie like you are doing with luxrender? because Pixie has very fast displacement,subsurface scattering,point based color bleeding and poitnt based glossy reflection .

 
You could start experimenting with Poser's built-in RIB export to do first tests. For a one-click solution, I played with writing a Python RIB exporter for 3Delight back in 2003 (search the forums for PoserMan). For an interested developer, it shouldn't be too hard to update it and adapt it to Pixie.

 Thanks Kevin, so am I correct to assume that the material name on a portal in the .lxo file must be "portal" to have luxrender recognise it as a Portal?