you know what i found out today?

that lux lights when rendered are not anit-aliased. they look bad when they dont have glow on.

what were they thinking at luxrender?

Ill give the linear tonemapping a shot tonight and see if there is any difference.

I used 2 point lights in this one, Ill have to read back a little on the sun lights settings.

Don't forget setting up light groups, I've found that very helpful too.  Just add this line to each light object, using a different group name so you can adjust each light or set of lights individually.

start light "Light 1"

AttributeBegin
 LightGroup "point"
 TransformBegin
  Translate 2.49634790421 23.3282966614 6.60856676102
  AreaLightSource "area"
   "color L" [1.0 1.0 0.980392158031]
   "float gain" [1.0]
   Shape "sphere" "float radius" [1.30813953488]
  TransformEnd
AttributeEnd

end light "Light 1"

I think it is a bug introduced in 0.7. I've seen earlier renders looking directly at the sun and it is beautiful. There seems to be a hard black edge around any light source, whether it is a mesh or anything else.

I was just experimenting with the environment camera and got what you see above.

But on the lux website there is this image (the rightmost) looking directly at the sun. No problem there.

Note: The environment camera can be used to generate equirectangular images - the kind we use on my environment sphere. I wrote a complicated Python shader to generate infinite clouds but it never looked good in Poser. When I get past this exporter and can work on the C++ code of Lux, I'll implement 3D clouds in LuxRender and then we can make all the sky images we want.

Quote -
I think it is a bug introduced in 0.7. I've seen earlier renders looking directly at the sun and it is beautiful. There seems to be a hard black edge around any light source, whether it is a mesh or anything else.

Try changing the PixelFilter from mitchell/sinc to something else.

is this a glossy floor?

Quote - > Quote -

I think it is a bug introduced in 0.7. I've seen earlier renders looking directly at the sun and it is beautiful. There seems to be a hard black edge around any light source, whether it is a mesh or anything else.

Try changing the PixelFilter from mitchell/sinc to something else.

Whoa - thanks for that tip. Gaussian worked great.

Quote -  This one is a bit less over-exposed ;)
Rendered overnight.

Beautiful. The super soft glossiness of the floor is perfect. Can't get that in Poser. Look under her right foot. Awesome.

Great light and color in that!

Quote - > Quote - y When I get past this exporter and can work on the C++ code of Lux, I'll implement 3D clouds in LuxRender and then we can make all the sky images we want.

it would be great if you would add SSS to LUX hehehe.. i have a feeling that the LUX guys will never realese a SSS shader.
you know how SSS works and you would know how to code it in less then 1 month.

please do SSS in LUX. clouds can whait hehehehehehheh ;) we will donate money for your work.
bagginsbill you are our only hope..............epic choir music

p.s.: i undertand that LUX is free and that a lot of users use it for rooms and cars. but SSS is 20 years old and used almost everywhere. for christ sake lux is a physical correct render. making SSS can not be that hard to add to the code.

we need humans in LUX

Quote -  This one is a bit less over-exposed ;)
Rendered overnight.

That looks great!

Oh the fun we're going to have....lol. Especially now that I know I can use my beloved dynamic cloth in it without problems ;o).

Laurie

Quote - > Quote -  It rendered for 9 hours because I turned it on this morning before going to work. :)

I ran a few test renders last night on the same scene getting the sun direction and camera position right and they were acceptable quality within 30 minutes.
The overexposure is on purpose, gain is already low at 0.04 but I cranked the fstop down to all the way to 0.7, exposure at 1/250, iso at 80.

If you adjust the gamma under linear you can also get the image toned down. Just play around (I've been doing it for days....lol).

Laurie

LOL, I could have done that.. actually I did quite a few times on that image, but the guard house wall and the window just looked a bit more interesting when left over-exposed.

IMHO of course. ;)

Quote - > Quote -  This one is a bit less over-exposed ;)

Rendered overnight.

Beautiful. The super soft glossiness of the floor is perfect. Can't get that in Poser. Look under her right foot. Awesome.

Great light and color in that!

Thanks.
I used just 1 sunsky, placed it quite low (0.3) and lowered the blackbody temp to about 5500K.
I'll have to play around with the aconst/bconst/etc numbers a bit, the air should be a bit red-desert sandy I think. :)

The gain controls not the luminance of the object, but rather the total energy given off by the object. This means that two objects (or actors on a figure) that have the same gain, but a different total surface area, will appear to have different luminance.

Here Andy is a light. But some of his parts are much bigger than other parts. The larger the part, the darker it is.

This is something I'll have to fix when I get into the Lux source and build my own version. It's really annoying that it doesn't have a simple option to disable the division by total area and just use the gain setting as is to define the luminance density instead of total luminance.

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - y When I get past this exporter and can work on the C++ code of Lux, I'll implement 3D clouds in LuxRender and then we can make all the sky images we want.

it would be great if you would add SSS to LUX hehehe.. i have a feeling that the LUX guys will never realese a SSS shader.
you know how SSS works and you would know how to code it in less then 1 month.

please do SSS in LUX. clouds can whait hehehehehehheh ;) we will donate money for your work.
bagginsbill you are our only hope..............epic choir music

p.s.: i undertand that LUX is free and that a lot of users use it for rooms and cars. but SSS is 20 years old and used almost everywhere. for christ sake lux is a physical correct render. making SSS can not be that hard to add to the code.

we need humans in LUX

ok Iceboy WE GET IT. you want SSS. mention it one more freakin time and I swear... I WILL lock you in a room with an endless tape of Barney the Dinosaur!

got that!? your constant going on about it is annoying

Quote -
This is something I'll have to fix when I get into the Lux source and build my own version. It's really annoying that it doesn't have a simple option to disable the division by total area and just use the gain setting as is to define the luminance density instead of total luminance.

In the meantime, if you'd like me to include surface area computation in the geometry exporter, just ask.

Hmm. I'll leave it up to others to decide if it's worth doing. I think most people will use simple cylinders and stuff for glowing objects. A figure as a light source is probably a very rare thing.

It would also be a good idea, if we did it, that the geometry exporter asks the material system if it is going to glow, before bothering with the calculation.

It probably won't be rare for me.  I plan to use it with candle flames, lightbulbs, headlights, etc.

actually, the main thing i'd want to be a light source is specific materials.  like Stonemason sets that have lights defined by materials.  like futuristic touch screens.  like neon signs outside buildings.  i realize most flames and magic effect stuff would be impossible as true lights because they use transparency, but i'd think anything that uses a whole material zone would be fun to use that way.  the main time i'd use a simple primitive would be to duplicate studio lighting, or on a lighting prop that hadn't been made with bulb geometry.

Quote - Hmm. I'll leave it up to others to decide if it's worth doing. I think most people will use simple cylinders and stuff for glowing objects. A figure as a light source is probably a very rare thing.

It would also be a good idea, if we did it, that the geometry exporter asks the material system if it is going to glow, before bothering with the calculation.

It shouldn't take more than five minutes to implement, so I wouldn't be particularly sad if it ended up not being used too much.

I don't think the geometry exporter should be talking to the material system at all. I'll provide an API that lets you specify what to pick up from Poser, how to preprocess it and then get the data out via generators. It won't compute the surface area until you ask for it.

Quote - The gain controls not the luminance of the object, but rather the total energy given off by the object.

Indeed, the rationale being that a tiny 40W lightbulb would be much more intense than a huge 40W light globe. There is a thread in the Lux forum about this, and about how to control luminance, especially for transparent/transparent light sources; You might want to check it.

Quote - actually, the main thing i'd want to be a light source is specific materials.  like Stonemason sets that have lights defined by materials.

Lux has a light type for that (see my post from yesterday ( ithink)), so that shouldn't be a problem at all.

Quote - i realize most flames and magic effect stuff would be impossible as true lights because they use transparency

They should be easy too, see the thread I posted just above for some examples of transparent lights in Lux.

I already have light source by material implemented. That's what I'm doing here. The reason Andy was a light source was because I used the Ambient_Value in the Poser shader. That instantly makes that material a light source. Any polygon with that material is a light source. It hasn't anything to do with geometry. It's all in the material converter.

Quote - Any polygon with that material is a light source. It hasn't anything to do with geometry. It's all in the material converter.

Who are you saying this to, and why?

Quote - > Quote - Any polygon with that material is a light source. It hasn't anything to do with geometry. It's all in the material converter.

Who are you saying this to, and why?

I think he was answering kobaltkween? Just a guess ;o).

Laurie

Lux is one case where a material can be a full-fledged light, with all attributes a light can have, so the strict separation of mesh vs. light which exists in Poser doesn't apply here.

Lux's area lights are real lights, for you don't just control luminance and color, but the full slew of parameters any other light has (you can even add IES files to them!...).

So yes, we need a way to easily transform any type of material, not just to a light-emitting cheat like Poser's "Ambient", but to a real light.

Really guys, check the Lux forum thread I linked to above.

Ah, according to that thread, the normalization is skipped if either the power or efficacy is set to 0.

We should really start reading those forums. :laugh:

rty - I may be not reading your correctly, but it seems like you're giving instructions in what is desired, when I'm trying to explain that I already did that. I said that I detect that you want a Lux area light in the mat converter, via the fact that in poser you had ambient turned on. Then I convert that material into a Lux area light material, including the ability to modulate color and gain. This is just a short-term solution until I manage to do the full mathematical analysis of the shader. The goal is to detect what the shader is trying to do, given how you do things in Poser, and then do a Lux version that does that, only doing it the Lux (better) way.

Also, I found this tidbit in the lux thread you linked to. Thanks for the link.

Quote - Also note that if you set the power or the efficiency to 0, then the normalization is disabled and the light intensity per unit surface area will be the same whatever the size of the object.

[Edit] Cross-post odf.

Quote - ...We should really start reading those forums. :laugh:

I really need to as well ;o). And I need to get that GUI working....I'm off to fix it ;o).

Lauri

The room is a Poser box, with the normals inverted.

The light fixture is also a Poser box. I used the grouping tool to to make a hole in the bottom. Inside, I placed a point light, scaled to 300%. I instructed LuxPose to export point lights as spherical area lights. So inside there is basically a light bulb.

I paused the render here at 47 minutes. I'm going to let it run overnight. The fireflies better be gone!

I know what you mean BB. Everytime I render something in it, it's like a whole new level of wow ;o). If this plugin turns into what I think it will, I'll most likely never use Firefly again, not even IF it's faster...lol.

Laurie

Quote - Man, this thing is so awesome. I can't get anything like this out of Poser, no matter how long I let it render.

...

I paused the render here at 47 minutes. I'm going to let it run overnight. The fireflies better be gone!

I want the GPU rendering ready to go.  There's things I'd like to do with the render engine, but I need reasonable quality out of fairly big images with fairly quick turnaround.

Keith, did you watch the video demo of the near-realtime GPU rendering, somebody showing an Audi R8 materials being edited with feedback in a second or so? It's pretty incredible.

I was going to buy a new desktop for heavy rendering duty, but maybe all I need to do is buy a new video card. grin

http://vimeo.com/14290797

Quote - http://vimeo.com/14290797

Holy shit, that's fast! If I could get even 10 times that speed out of a render, it would still be faster than Firefly ;o).

I guess I'm so willing to wait for a render because I used to be such a heavy Vue user. There was never anything fast about a Vue render...lmao. You learn to live with it ;o). But GPU rendering will be SWEET!

Laurie

I want.
WANT
need!
have to have!

Slowwwly catching up on this thread. My-oh-my, this is beyond exciting! I stand (lying down, actually :biggrin:) uncovered in the presence of greatness. Glad I've got a week off work when we get back to Oz after our holidays in the States so I can play with this thing.

So, I guess I'll need to strip out all skin shaders stuff to bare-bones skin ImageMaps... no dramas, there. Laurie's renders have totally got me drooling. Mind you: ALL of your (all of you, including Laurie) renders are incredible.

A humble debt of gratitude to the incredible minds that took up this challenge and came up with this brilliant product!

want.
ok I say you girls hold BB down. we get the crowbar and the vaseline and pry that code outta his hands... gotta be careful tho... can't damage the fingers.. he needs those to code... but we must get this render engine and SOON

Quote -
Thanks for the information . I may have cured the problem, atleast for me.

1. Uninstalled LuxPose.

2. Deleted the folder that BB mentioned

3. Moved the LuxPose.air File out of the Poser 8RuntimePythonposerScriptsPoserLuxExporter_alpha_1-10eAIR folder to the Poser 8RuntimePythonposerScriptsPoserLuxExporter_alpha_1-10e folder.

4. Looked at the dataOut.bbml

5. Ran LuxPose and made changes

6. Looked at dataOut.bbml  file again and yes there were changes.

7. Used your PoserLuxExporter_alpha_1-10e Python Exporter.
   No changes when I opened LuxRender.

8. Ok, this time I deleted your generated poserscene_alpha 1.0.3.lxs File from the Poser 8RuntimePythonposerScriptsPoserLuxExporter_alpha_1-10etoLux Folder.

9. Ran your PoserLuxExporter.py script

10. Opened LuxRender

11. opend the New poserscene_alpha 1.0.3.lxs File

12. Voila!!!! - It now works for me.

Interested to see "IF" this works for Laurie

Quote - Maybe you're right, mariner.

The script looks in the path where it is started from for a folder with name "AIR" for the datafile written by the GUI.

If you installed the GUI to some other place the datafiles are not found by the script.

You can check this to be shure: Make some change via GUI. Then look into the datafile at AIR/LuxPose/data/dataOut.bbml if something is changed in the file after you pressed OK in the GUI.

Thank you sir! It did indeed work for me :o).

I'm a happy camper.

Laurie

Just saw this posted on the Daz forum, might come in handy when finding the right colours for your lights.

How was done.
Beside the room that has two walls and a floor there are two planar figures standing on the floor where begins the shadow. The material of the figure was set to "glass" with transmisivity set to 1 and index of refraction also set to 1.

#***** Material 'oni'
MakeNamedMaterial "oni"
   "string type" ["glass"]
   "color Kr" [0 0 0]
   "color Kt" [1 1 1]
   "float index" [1]

Well, this result is nothing "physically correct", a glass with the same index of refraction than air (1.0) is 100% transparent and so it is invisible and can't cast any shadow at all!!!

From old school books,

reflected/incident     = (n1 - n2)/(n1 + n2) = 0
transmitted/incident = 2n1/(n1 + n2)        = 1             In this case n1 = n2 = 1

Any way, the result is very useful and I love it.
     

Quote - actually, the main thing i'd want to be a light source is specific materials.  like Stonemason sets that have lights defined by materials.  like futuristic touch screens.  like neon signs outside buildings.  i realize most flames and magic effect stuff would be impossible as true lights because they use transparency, but i'd think anything that uses a whole material zone would be fun to use that way.  the main time i'd use a simple primitive would be to duplicate studio lighting, or on a lighting prop that hadn't been made with bulb geometry.

this is not a good idea IMO.

the mesh from those materials are super detailed. to much detailed. it will slow the rendertime way to much.

i really sugest that you use simple geometry for lighting.

what kind of spherical area light does it look? how is the shape? is it very mesh detailed?can you decide what kind of mesh is used for point lights?

like this?

Quote -  Hi guys,

Just saw this posted on the Daz forum, might come in handy when finding the right colours for your lights.
and the best part is that we change ligt color while its rendering and look it in real time.

Quote - Thank you sir! It did indeed work for me :o).

I'm a happy camper.

Laurie

Most Welcome. I am happy to hear that it worked for you.

i am thinking in modeling very simple low poly geometry objects for light sources. you would then have a runtime folder called lights and you could load them inside the poser scene. every material would be set to ambient.the objects would also be UV mapped so that simple textures could be added.

the more faces the object has the longer it renders as a light source.

this has 24 faces. so 24 small area lights. i would use this when you dont see the ''spotlight''

this has 96 faces. so a lot of area lights. i would use this for a close up or when the light is in camera.

i just realized that we will be able to use real anisotropic for hair.

evil smile : heheheheheehehhehehhehehheheh

ice-boy, you're not paying attention to what I said I did already.

I am using the LuxRender sphere object - a mathematically pure sphere that has no facets - it is perfectly round.

When you create a point light and use the LuxPose GUI checkbox "Emit Point Lights as Spheres" they are real spheres.

so the mathematical pure sphere is in the code?

and the code tells Lux if the sphere is bigger or smaller?