Quote - I agree Laurie! This is still a project in the making. Perhaps when all is fully completed the Lux people might put a link to the exporter as they have for Blender and ect. Oh, and by the way, I do like the logo someone posted a couple of pages back.

As for me, I decided to get ambitious (seeings as it is my birthday) and tried exporting my Nuka Cola bottle to Lux. BB is right, the glass material isn't working for it. You can't see the cola inside the bottle.  Oh, well. Probably I was getting way too ambitious.

Maybe your bottle is a candidate for the glass2 material? ;o).

And Happy Birthday!

Laurie

Attached Link: He Died For HIs Quantum

Thanks Laurie!  Yes, I think the bottle is. The bottle was modeled for me a year ago and does have thickness and a separate model inside of it for the soda. This friend and I were heavily into playing Fallout 3 and I decided to make a Nuka Cola bottle (which is an icon of the game). The Fallout render I did with it can be found here:

I may not reply much today, the latest firefox is playing silly beggars with me & refusing to let me post some of the time, I've just had 5 attempts at this one to finally get it to post.

Quote - > Quote - Your second point about the Lux developers being the ones to do this kind of stuff.. reading the lux forums they seem to be way too busy to work on documenting stuff, and anyway developers are usually not the best document writers. You could be making a great contribution to the entire Luxrender community, not just our little group.

That may be true, but I prefer not to piss off the Luxrender ppl right now with barrages of questions on a not-as-yet-fully-developed exporter they know nothing about. The Reality users are already posting in their forums on how to install Reality ffs...do you want to add Poser users to that mix? Not like Poser users already are looked down upon or anything ;o). Truth is, why would they want to add our stuff to their wiki and why would we want to add our stuff when we have a perfectly good wiki we can use here? With what I've seen over there posted by Daz users trying to use Reality (a program the Luxrender developers have absolutely nothing to do with) I can only assume misinformed Poser users will do the same - ask the wrong questions of the wrong people. I don't know about you, but I really don't want to see that ;o).

Laurie

You seem to have missed the whole point I was making. ;)

I said that the Lux devs seem to have their hands more than full enough, so if rty has good useful information about materials then it would be good to have that documented. And not only for us Poser users, but for the whole Luxrender community because it looks like they are falling quite a bit behind with their own documentation.

Quote - You seem to have missed the whole point I was making. ;)

I said that the Lux devs seem to have their hands more than full enough, so if rty has good useful information about materials then it would be good to have that documented. And not only for us Poser users, but for the whole Luxrender community because it looks like they are falling quite a bit behind with their own documentation.

Oh, I apologize then ;o). I guess if rty wants to email them privately if he wants and work something out, might be a good thing ;o).

Again, sorry for misunderstanding. I've had this prevailing paranoia about LuxPose users posting at the Luxrender forums for information on how to use/install LuxPose, like I've been seeing Daz users doing for Reality. I feel at this stage in the game, tis probably better that we don't irritate the benefactors of the renderer we're trying to make an exporter for right now.  I'd hate to see Poser users reputations suffer more than they already are in the 3D world...lol. Not that I think it's nice, but it is the way it is....hehe.

Laurie

Back to the fun stuff.. anybody know how I can get rid of this noise? It will clear up pretty well in the lit areas, but the shadow areas stay very noisy. I'm using 3 large point lights in the corners and 1 small weak point light in the candle. I've tried using gaussian pixel filter, I've tried surface integrators bidirectional, distributed path and path, but it stays noisy.. What am I missing?

Quote - The only other thing that I can see would be how the lights are currently being written out. At the moment, they are all given the same name of default which seems to give visual errors on how the polygons of figures are rendered. I guess I'm trying to say that most of them appear to be massive black blocks instead of smooth shadows; but, if you give them all separate names like Light 1, Light 2, and etc the shadows render smoothly. Though, technically, that might be a problem with how Lux itself interprets the lights from the exporter.

I would redo the same pic with a Poser high-res sphere and the same lights, just to make sure which part is due to mesh and which part is due to lights.

There is already a thread in the LuxRender forum user support section about a bug causing blocky shadows. Not saying your problem is due to the same bug (the bug appears no matter what the lights are named), but in case, since the Lux devs are trying to fix it, adding whatever additional additional insight we might have can only help them to pinpoint it.

Quote - I don't expect the LuxPose exporter to be anywhere near final in the next 1 or 2 months, that's a lot of time for your documentation to be useful.

That's about the time one would need to write it!... :-D

Quote - > Quote - Quick Question:

Do you get a skewed image when you copy it from LuxRender to the clipboard and then into a image editing program like Photoshop?

 

Usually.  I've kind of given up on that.

Rarely. I think it has to do with which app you use to copy the clipboard in. Maybe some slight incompatibility, or a more or less strict implementation of clipboard norms?
Anyway, I have found that XnView (free image viewer/converter) usually has no problems with Lux clipboard exports, so I use that.

Quote - tried exporting my Nuka Cola bottle to Lux. BB is right, the glass material isn't working for it. You can't see the cola inside the bottle.  Oh, well. Probably I was getting way too ambitious.

That's not normal; Glass is an old material and working; Could it be you have a double IoR, and light gets lost inside your glass? (Sorry, can't see your picture, there is a "maturity" filter blocking people who aren't members.)

Anyway, if your glass and liquid meshes are really perfectly aligned (no spaces), you can indeed try the glass2 material. Prepare to rip out some hair though.

The material syntax would be something like that:

MakeNamedMaterial "MyMaterial" "string
type" ["glass2"]<br></br>
   "bool architectural" ["false"]<br></br>
   "bool dispersion" ["false"]<br></br><br></br>
    # Volume 'TheWorld'<br></br>
Texture "Scene:named_volumes:2.tex:value"
"fresnel" "constant"<br></br>
   "float value" [1.0]<br></br>
MakeNamedVolume "TheWorld" "clear"
"texture fresnel"
["Scene:named_volumes:2.tex:value"]<br></br>
   "color absorption" [0.0 0.0 0.0]<br></br><br></br>
    # Volume 'MyGlass'<br></br>
Texture "Scene:named_volumes:1.tex:value"
"fresnel" "constant"<br></br>
   "float value" [1.5]<br></br>
MakeNamedVolume "MyGlass" "clear" "texture
fresnel" ["Scene:named_volumes:1.tex:value"]<br></br>
   "color absorption" [0.9 0.6 0.2]

The problem is you need to declare those volumes also in the mesh, too (in the .lxo file), and so far we haven't tried that, so I can't tell you how it works exactly. It seems to be straightforward, like adding some lines on the material naming of the mesh:

    NamedMaterial "MyMaterial"<br></br>
    Exterior "TheWorld"<br></br>
    Interior "MyGlass"

Don't ask me how to do this for 3 volumes (air-glass, glass-liquid, liquid-air)!...

Quote - Back to the fun stuff.. anybody know how I can get rid of this noise?

Let it render longer? What S/px ratio does that picture have?
I've never finished a render (doing tests, mostly), but from what I've seen, several thousand S/px seem to be necessary for most pictures but the most simple.

Quote - Back to the fun stuff.. anybody know how I can get rid of this noise? It will clear up pretty well in the lit areas, but the shadow areas stay very noisy.
I'm using 3 large point lights in the corners and 1 small weak point light in the candle.
I've tried using gaussian pixel filter, I've tried surface integrators bidirectional, distributed path and path, but it stays noisy..
What am I missing?

what render settings are you using? 

> Quote - > Quote - tried exporting my Nuka Cola bottle to Lux. BB is right, the glass material isn't working for it. You can't see the cola inside the bottle.  Oh, well. Probably I was getting way too ambitious. > > > > That's not normal; Glass is an old material and working; Could it be you have a double IoR, and light gets lost inside your glass? (Sorry, can't see your picture, there is a "maturity" filter blocking people who aren't members.) > > Anyway, if your glass and liquid meshes are really perfectly aligned (no spaces), you can indeed try the glass2 material. Prepare to rip out some hair though. > > The material syntax would be something like that: > > MakeNamedMaterial "MyMaterial" "string > type" ["glass2"]
>    "bool architectural" ["false"]
>    "bool dispersion" ["false"]

>     # Volume 'TheWorld'
> Texture "Scene:named_volumes:2.tex:value" > "fresnel" "constant"
>    "float value" [1.0]
> MakeNamedVolume "TheWorld" "clear" > "texture fresnel" > ["Scene:named_volumes:2.tex:value"]
>    "color absorption" [0.0 0.0 0.0]

>     # Volume 'MyGlass'
> Texture "Scene:named_volumes:1.tex:value" > "fresnel" "constant"
>    "float value" [1.5]
> MakeNamedVolume "MyGlass" "clear" "texture > fresnel" ["Scene:named_volumes:1.tex:value"]
>    "color absorption" [0.9 0.6 0.2] > > > The problem is you need to declare those volumes also in the mesh, too (in the .lxo file), and so far we haven't tried that, so I can't tell you how it works exactly. It seems to be straightforward, like adding some lines on the material naming of the mesh: > >     NamedMaterial "MyMaterial"
>     Exterior "TheWorld"
>     Interior "MyGlass" > > > Don't ask me how to do this for 3 volumes (air-glass, glass-liquid, liquid-air)!...

Hmmm, BB did say it would be a nightmare. I stopped the render. This is what I was getting.

This is an earlier attempt, distributed path, gaussian filter, after 8 hours..

Quote - This is an earlier attempt, distributed path, gaussian filter, after 8 hours..

try

-samples : metropolis strengts 0.6
-integrator: bidirectonal 5 bounces
-filter gausian

Liz,

After reading about your bottle, I got curious and whipped up a quick bottle with liquid in Wings 3D. So far, regular glass is working. Not sure why it's not for you :o(.

I'll post the image in a bit when it's rendered for awhile.

Laurie

Alright! After adjusting all of the hair groups root and tip sizes to a quarter of their Poser settings (nods to odf and DisneyFan, and thanks to a Python script!! ) my rat is looking normal again! :)  I left the number of hairs as it was for this quickie.

I think someone should make a nice render of that rat and post it to the Luxrender gallery.

I had serious problems with bidirectional and it doesn't work properly, mirrors making the render never converge turning into a full biased renderer and point lights casting impossible shadows.
Path integrator works fine and without problems.

HI I am happy  to Report that the latest Build of LUXPOSE  successfully exports the scene from poser6 OSX with one "issue" that is probably my fault.

LUX will not parse the file but that is likeyl due to the fact that I am "trapped" on LUX version .061 because any higher version requires
I upgrade to at least MacOS 10.5+( Im still on 10.4).

ERROR MESSAGE: **"2010-Sep-16 07:58:54 Severe error: 47] Parsing error in file 'poserscene_alpha 1.22.lxs' at line 1: syntax error"
**
This is a NON issue for me personally because I had no plans to send poser scenes To LUX for rendering.
as We have Both Vray 1.2 FOR C4D and Maxwell render from Nextlimit.
But I was just curious about the LUX pose plugin and am Glad to see poser 6 supported on Windows and Mac.

Cheers

I've found that restarting Lux often helped with those parsing errors, although that was for version 0.7

Quote - Back to the fun stuff.. anybody know how I can get rid of this noise? It will clear up pretty well in the lit areas, but the shadow areas stay very noisy.
I'm using 3 large point lights in the corners and 1 small weak point light in the candle.
I've tried using gaussian pixel filter, I've tried surface integrators bidirectional, distributed path and path, but it stays noisy..
What am I missing?

I remember I read somewhere to mutch light energy leads to noise (but not really sure). Maybe you can try to lower the gain of all of your lights?

This is getting fun lol. Can anyone point me in right direction with link or cheatsheet about which nr's are which colors (indication of course) for
"color Kr" [0.8 0.8 0.8]
"color Kt" [0.5 0.5 0.4].
Thks ever so much

Quote - Hmmm, BB did say it would be a nightmare. I stopped the render. This is what I was getting.

Yes, it seems indeed your cumulative IoR (outer wall + inner wall) is too high, since it shows you the blueish ground plane wherever applicable; Only the parts which have an angle pretty close to 90° are transparent. (No guarantee my physics are accurate though!... :-D)
Anyway, it acts like a solid glass pillar would.

If you can make the inner glass wall an other material, do it, and give it the "architecture" flag so it ignores IoR. Won't look totally physically right, but at least you'll see the liquid.

(BTW, you're sure Nuke Cola bottles were that large? I recall them being thinner, at least in Fallout 1 and 2.)

Quote - after 8 hours..

That's a Poser reflex! Render times in Lux are extremely variable; You might get in 10 minutes what on another picture might require a day, on the same computer. Obviously using different computers you'll get another difference factor of 1000+.

The unit for render "quality" in Lux is the S/px value Lux displays on the bottom. It means "Samples/pixel", and is the number telling you how thoroughly Lux has worked on an average pixel. That's the only really objective thing you know about a render. (More is obviously better, and values of 20000 S/px for high-end production shots are apparently pretty common.)

All this to say, 8 hours could get you to a million S/px (on a 32-core renderfarm!), or just to meager 200-300 S/px (on my computer...).

Quote - I remember I read somewhere to mutch light energy leads to noise (but not really sure).

Fireflies, IIRC (but it is possible it adds noise, too).

Anyway, the word on light (according to the Lux devs) is to keep it low. After all, you can up the exposure as much as you want in Tonemapping, that doesn't (shouldn't?) affect the render.

Quote - This is getting fun lol. Can anyone point me in right direction with link or cheatsheet about which nr's are which colors (indication of course) for
"color Kr" [0.8 0.8 0.8]
"color Kt" [0.5 0.5 0.4].
Thks ever so much

Not sure I understood the question, but the values you see are RGB ([1.0 1.0 1.0] is white), so the first (Kr) would be a light gray, the second (Kt) a very slightly yellowish middle gray.

@latexluv Most likely there is a problem with the modelling of your glass-liquid system. Extract the inner surface of the bottle up to the height of the liquid fill. Use this newly generated geometry as your liquid, close the hole on top as this will be your liquid's upper surface , reverse normal direction  - normals need to point outwards for liquid surfaces in contact with the bottle, in most cases the normals of the liquid's upper surface LUS needs to match camera's y position relative to the upper surface in a xyz-coordinate system, e.g. camera y < surface y --> normal direction LUS (-surface y) / camera y > surface y ---> normal direction of LUS (+surface y)   - and apply liquid material. Check this link for modelling glass-liquid systems and proper setup of polygon normals. hXXp://XXX.3dmayatutorials.com/l_glass.htm

Test render with some DOF in the making. Couple of hundred samples.

bagginsbill can you show an example of a skin render in a close up?  i just want to see how it looks in a close up.

a demo render will give me more strength to wait.

thanks.

www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php

I'm pretty sure this is already in the wishlist for LuxPose.

AHA posting seems to be working for me again. :D

Thks RTY will see if I can find table/sheet to show values(RGB) for colors. What I want of course I way to color glass and know the right values.

Quote - Thks RTY will see if I can find table/sheet to show values(RGB) for colors. What I want of course I way to color glass and know the right values.

It's not that hard to figure out. If 1.0 1.0 1.0 is white and 0.0 0.0 0.0 is black, a color like 0.3 0.0 0.3 would make a dark evenly mixed purple and 0.7 0.0 0.7 would make a lighter evenly mixed purple [red green blue].

Laurie

i've been using the charts on this page to get color values.

i'm having the same posting problems as lucifer, but only on this thread; i can post in other threads just fine.  finally hit the 'reply to' link & now it works.  must be the season for gremlins.

laurie and jancory thks a million and onto my color cooking LOL

After 9 hours and at 400 S/px, this is what it looks like using the values suggested here; metropolis, bidirectional and gaussian. Almost clean, just a little bit left on the sofa and blinds.

> Quote - bagginsbill can you show an example of a skin render in a close up?  i just want to see how it looks in a close up. > > a demo render will give me more strength to wait. > > thanks.

I didn't spend any time fixing this - just rendered. I have no good eye textures - this was the only one I could find without burned-in specular and it is terrible. Also, V4 eye geometry is terrible. Just ignore the eyes.

The skin is a glossy material only - no tricks. Light is Sun+Sky. Rendered for 30 minutes.

Click for full size.

Note: Look at the bottom of the chin - the terminator is polygonized. As noted in earlier posts this is terrible.

Quote - Note: Look at the bottom of the chin - the terminator is polygonized. As noted in earlier posts this is terrible.

I'm having this problem with anything even remotely shiny or reflective. And it's not due to lack of polys (at least in my case). It's a Luxrender bug for sure.

Laurie

Ok, I've been thinking hard the last day or two... Get ready - let's see if I can explain this in a way that makes sense...lol:

I've been pondering the obvious discrepancy between Poser, that can't handle extremely poly-heavy scenes and Luxrender, that loves high poly and can handle them fine. So I was thinking: could it be possible to have a low res placeholder in Poser and somehow swap it out for a high res version during the exporting process? I know I'm probably asking a whole lot. And it wouldn't solve anything for current content, only future content if it was possible. But I was thinking how nice that would be if we could do that. Set the scene up with low poly things in Poser and grab the high poly versions at export ;o). I added it to the wishlist btw. I can dream...lol.

Laurie

Laurie - odf's exporter already supports making high poly from the low poly. The GUI just needs to be built to let you choose where to apply this.

I'm also thinking about a selective subdivision, based on the normal of the polygon with respect to light sources. It would be pretty easy I think to decide which polygons are near a terminator and handle them differently. I'm not familiar with SubD algorithms, though, so odf would need to comment.

The only reason I said something was, I'm having much better luck with objects that I smooth myself in a modeling program where I can can control hard and soft edges. odf's subdivision subdivides and smooths everything, even corners ;o). Not sure how that can be worked around, but if that's possible then that would be the ideal solution. But it would be even better if it could be done on a per object basis rather than every prop or every figure. Tall order, I know ;o)

Laurie

Attached Link: Just Color Picker

If you can't divide RGB values by 255 to get them into range this color picker (for PC) will be useful.

It can produce RGB 0-1 from conventional RGB 0-255 with sliders

Quote - If you can't divide RGB values by 255 to get them into range this color picker (for PC) will be useful.

It can produce RGB 0-1 from conventional RGB 0-255 with sliders

Thanks :o)

Laurie

Quote - Note: Look at the bottom of the chin - the terminator is polygonized. As noted in earlier posts this is terrible.

sigh
Please read my post in the wishlist thread, first page, about the bottom (sorry, don't know how to link to specific posts here)

I think most of us have seen it rty. And I'm not sure how to add your wish to the wishlist as there is already an entry for subdivision and it's been implemented already, although not on a per object basis. I'm not sure how your request differs from what's already on the list.

Laurie

Quote - And I'm not sure how to add your wish to the wishlist as there is already an entry for subdivision

Yes, I know. Except that there is a difference between subdivision "because we want even better results" and subdivision "because we hope to get acceptable results".
To put it bluntly, the tests rg5a did (and posted in the Lux forum) were done with whatever subdivision LuxPose is capable of right now (23a), so it is clearly very far from being enough. It seems we need more, much more, and that's what the post was all about.
(Now, how much more, that's another question - only tests will be able to tell)

And to put you own (LaurieA) concerns at ease, rg5a has gone to great lengths to make sure it wasn't a LuxPose issue before posting there - if there is a couple of people who don't want to look like fools to the Lux crowd, we're part of it. We've got 2 other issues pending, but rg5a wants to wait till the weekend before posting them over there, to make sure they're reproducible and not just due to our own computers.

Quote - > Quote - And I'm not sure how to add your wish to the wishlist as there is already an entry for subdivision

Yes, I know. Except that there is a difference between subdivision "because we want even better results" and subdivision "because we hope to get acceptable results".
To put it bluntly, the tests rg5a did (and posted in the Lux forum) were done with whatever subdivision LuxPose is capable of right now (23a), so it is clearly very far from being enough. It seems we need more, much more, and that's what the post was all about.
(Now, how much more, that's another question - only tests will be able to tell)

And to put you own (LaurieA) concerns at ease, rg5a has gone to great lengths to make sure it wasn't a LuxPose issue before posting there - if there is a couple of people who don't want to look like fools to the Lux crowd, we're part of it. We've got 2 other issues pending, but rg5a wants to wait till the weekend before posting them over there, to make sure they're reproducible and not just due to our own computers.

Good. That does put my mind at ease...lmao.

I didn't mean to insinuate that most Poser users aren't strong in the gray matter department, but there are always a few who make the rest of us look bad...lol. Mostly because they don't bother to do what you do - make sure what the problem is before you post ;o). But, having said that, I certainly have asked my share of shoot-myself-in-the-foot-and-put-it-in-my-mouth stupid questions...rotflmao.

Laurie

Quote - I didn't mean to insinuate that most Poser users aren't strong in the gray matter department, but there are always a few who make the rest of us look bad...lol.

Crowd dynamics mixed with individual laziness. Individually taken we're all intelligent and nice, as a crowd we're just sheep. :-/

Anyway, to get back to the point, we have a new information, like, really breaking news from today September, 16th: The shading problem of Lux isn't fixable (I guess "in the next two versions"); Which means LuxPose has a chance to anticipate this and implement a workaround, before the reality crowd even notices that bug exists... evil gin

If we want, that is.

I bet they fix it eventually :o)

Laurie

Quote - I bet they fix it eventually :o)

If you mean lux devs - I wouldn't bet on it. Their priorities are elsewhere right now (GPU rendering), and even if we bug them about that kind of problems, it's not something they want to spend brain cycles upon. Given what we pay them, our best bet is to implement the needed fixes on our side.
Now obviously, given what we pay the LuxPose devs, it's their call, but if they want to go all the way, they'll have to, in one way or another.

Quote -
The skin is a glossy material only - no tricks. Light is Sun+Sky. Rendered for 30 minutes.

Click for full size.

Note: Look at the bottom of the chin - the terminator is polygonized. As noted in earlier posts this is terrible.

More kinks to work out ... ; ) 

The DOF looks good in this though  :)

I still find it pretty amazing that transmaps , hair and  DOF effects  do not crush the computer like FF does when trying to rendering. 

I would say you folks have done one hell of a  knockout job, given the window of time you have spent getting to this point. 

I have found this to be the most exciting thread to watch in a long time, almost everyday someone is coming up a new method, experiment or some really cool nugget of information...

Kudos to all for all your hard work ! :)