No worries.  I hadn't noticed any real activity in a long while, and was getting a little concerned.  Real life should be the top priority, especially if it puts the food on the table.

Yep, real work comes first ;o).

Here's hoping you get some rest at least bb...lol.

Laurie

Hehe - thanks. I turned 50 this year  - had a physical on Friday and, according to the tests, I have the heart and lungs of a 17 year old, thank God. So - with one kid in college and another starting in 2012, I'll have to pay double tuition that year. I'm fortunate enough to make enough money that colleges won't give us any financial aid. But I'm not so rich that double tuition doesn't freak me out. So I'm trying to pile up some serious cash for that, so I don't have to borrow or dip into retirement investments. Of course, if the extra work ends up killing me, that strategy would be a mistake. But the physical indicates that's not a problem, so I'm just going to keep on cranking as hard as I can for a while, even if I feel like crap most of the time.

insane_machine: nice picture.

is this just a bit of glossyness that causes the 'wet look' ?**
**

Honestly I have no idea, I like it being there but have no idea why it's there. Didn't have time to experiment at all but I'd guess that character mat simply gets translated to Lux like that.

What was your light set up?

Took bit of rough testing since it's been a while but I think I found the exact. Poser 8 Lights > Outdoor_BackRim Backlight intensity to 40%, all other lights almost halved in intensity and added a white spotlight, on the ground behind the camera at 30%. Hope this helps

the bump settings that we use in poser get translated to the Lux render settings?

Does having IDL lighting turned on transfer over from poser or can you leave it off?

Small, probably insignificant update on my end, but my Windows based computers are all out of commission and I can't even get 3D acceleration working under Ubuntu to get any work done. In other words, I'm not going to be around for a long time until I can figure out how to get new parts.

But, it seems that there's no real need to worry as you guys are still working on the project.

ignore my previous post. Found the answer

You can leave it off. Luxrender doesn't understand it and does it automatically anyway ;o).

Laurie

Unless you use the Direct Lighting integrator. Then it is not doing any bounced light between objects.

It's my plan to use that for generating material previews - the DL integrator is fast and if you're just looking at a material ball to check your shader you don't need indirect light.

there is not need IMO to connect render settings from Poser to Lux.BB made a fantastic looking LUXpose UI. and when you push the button to go to Luxpose you will have 100% control on the lux render settings.

Personally, I'd just as soon use Poser 4 style materials in Poser and choose how I want them to look on export. I assume, however, that that is a bit of coding...lol.

Laurie

Quote - Personally, I'd just as soon use Poser 4 style materials in Poser and choose how I want them to look on export. I assume, however, that that is a bit of coding...lol.

Laurie

That's my plan - I will be making a totally new "material room" just for LuxPose. In there you will assemble Lux materials, save them to your library, and then attach them to your scene material zones. The Poser material will be used only as a guesser, and to automatically populate texture maps. I've so far found little hope of truly converting Poser materials automatically, except for simple non-procedural ones.

a little offtopic but IMO could be good for Lux renders in the future.

is it possible to writte a script where it would automatic load all images to the right materails.

so for exampel i have the material name for the boots: ''boots_1''. in photoshop i would then save my boots texture as boots_1. now imagine that your model has 20 textures. could a script load all the textures,bumps,displacement to the right materials?

thanks.

Yes - that's my plan for VSS. Right now VSS only has Template Shaders and applies those to multiple zones that you group together. Next is Template Map sets and applies those to multiple zones as well. The resulting shader is a combination of the Template Shader and Template Map set assigned to each material zone.

That would be extremely useful! Right now I have a VSS prop set up that will switch all of my figure's textures to old style P4 type and I run that before exporting to Lux, but I still have to go in and change by hand textures that are on clothing bits or hair and background props. Seems it was a good thing that I kept my Poser 4 runtime intact on my external drive because I can load old prop sets from there with a minimum of fiddling before export to Lux.

Quote - > Quote - Personally, I'd just as soon use Poser 4 style materials in Poser and choose how I want them to look on export. I assume, however, that that is a bit of coding...lol.

Laurie

 

That's my plan - I will be making a totally new "material room" just for LuxPose. In there you will assemble Lux materials, save them to your library, and then attach them to your scene material zones. The Poser material will be used only as a guesser, and to automatically populate texture maps. I've so far found little hope of truly converting Poser materials automatically, except for simple non-procedural ones.

bagginsbill....

sometimes.....I think I love you. Sometimes....giggle

Laurie

Skin is mixed glossy/mattetranslucent.

Quote - > Quote - Personally, I'd just as soon use Poser 4 style materials in Poser and choose how I want them to look on export. I assume, however, that that is a bit of coding...lol.

Laurie

 

That's my plan - I will be making a totally new "material room" just for LuxPose.

You mean anything you promised the last few month was bullshit? Just said to stop further community-development? What about "I'm able to convert anything from the material-room to Lux automatically"? And, "if this doesn't work, I'll change the way how Lux handles materials to get it work with Poser"? No, you didn't say it exactly as I wrote above. But all your "fans" where reading it as this. What about those guys saying "impossible"? Are they right at the end? I'm disappointed. I don't think your LuxPose has any chance to compare with LuxBlend or even with DAZ-Reality. What you are talk about now could be already done. Just with Python, completly open source. Without this crappy Adobe shit. It's time to go on with a Universal-Material-Editor for Lux as ODF said weeks ago. I have a lot prepared already. Including material previews in realtime with multi-core environments.

Hold on now! Everyone just take a deep breath...

Now, to the coders: some things sound good to us non-coders. We haven't seen either one of your current solutions, so we must take them both at face value and according to what we are told. Fighting isn't going to solve shit, so if that's the way it's going to go, then LuxPose development may as well cease right now. Because no one has really been talking to each other, the coders have sort of gone their own ways. In a sense, that's fine because the easiest result will be the one that wins out in the end. However, I'd rather see a collaboration so that we can get the best elements of all into something that ppl can easily use.

Blowin' our tops won't help.

Laurie

I'm with Laurie. I've been testing out each new exporter that has been posted and I've seen some great improvement and I'm hoping for more really soon. There is a lot of potential for the collaborative LuxPose project.  BTW, I know that many pages back someone posted a potential Luxpose logo. Can someone post that logo to the Wiki pages? I'd like to start using it on my Luxpose images.

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - Personally, I'd just as soon use Poser 4 style materials in Poser and choose how I want them to look on export. I assume, however, that that is a bit of coding...lol.

Laurie

 

That's my plan - I will be making a totally new "material room" just for LuxPose.

You mean anything you promised the last few month was bullshit? Just said to stop further community-development? What about "I'm able to convert anything from the material-room to Lux automatically"? And, "if this doesn't work, I'll change the way how Lux handles materials to get it work with Poser"? No, you didn't say it exactly as I wrote above. But all your "fans" where reading it as this. What about those guys saying "impossible"? Are they right at the end? I'm disappointed. I don't think your LuxPose has any chance to compare with LuxBlend or even with DAZ-Reality. What you are talk about now could be already done. Just with Python, completly open source. Without this crappy Adobe shit. It's time to go on with a Universal-Material-Editor for Lux as ODF said weeks ago. I have a lot prepared already. Including material previews in realtime with multi-core environments.

I quited long time ago, what I said that I was going to do I dit it long time ago.

My goal was a stand alone wavefront obj or 3dsMax converter to LuxRender and I did it, it is simple, converts the geometry with all the seams and texturing and creates the basic Poser or 3ds materials and nothing more.

There's no automatic solution, shader trees are useless in Lux and lights are different too and it also makes no sense. If you want to create a scene in Poser and render it Lux it will not look the same as in Poser and if you want to look the same then render it in Poser. LuxRender has materials and capabilities that are impossible to be done it Poser and also has its own crap, any automatic conversion will not use the potencial of Lux and you are only wasting your time with very little results and a huge rendering time. I haven't seen any nice Lux rendering, with exception of Laurie, in all the pages in this thread, Poser 4 produce much better images.

What is needed is a two stage solution, the first stage is an geometry with basic materials exporter, it doesn't matter is within Poser or stand-alone, if it uses Python, Java, C or any other thing, it only matter to create the LuxRender files. The second stage is a scene editor, where you can set up the lights, cameras, use Lux materials and even position meshes in the scene. This can be done with a text editor as I am doing, or someone create a GUI to do it in a more friendly way.

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - > Quote - Personally, I'd just as soon use Poser 4 style materials in Poser and choose how I want them to look on export. I assume, however, that that is a bit of coding...lol.

Laurie

 

That's my plan - I will be making a totally new "material room" just for LuxPose.

You mean anything you promised the last few month was bullshit? Just said to stop further community-development? What about "I'm able to convert anything from the material-room to Lux automatically"? And, "if this doesn't work, I'll change the way how Lux handles materials to get it work with Poser"? No, you didn't say it exactly as I wrote above. But all your "fans" where reading it as this. What about those guys saying "impossible"? Are they right at the end? I'm disappointed. I don't think your LuxPose has any chance to compare with LuxBlend or even with DAZ-Reality. What you are talk about now could be already done. Just with Python, completly open source. Without this crappy Adobe shit. It's time to go on with a Universal-Material-Editor for Lux as ODF said weeks ago. I have a lot prepared already. Including material previews in realtime with multi-core environments.

I quited long time ago, what I said that I was going to do I dit it long time ago.

My goal was a stand alone wavefront obj or 3dsMax converter to LuxRender and I did it, it is simple, converts the geometry with all the seams and texturing and creates the basic Poser or 3ds materials and nothing more.

There's no automatic solution, shader trees are useless in Lux and lights are different too and it also makes no sense. If you want to create a scene in Poser and render it Lux it will not look the same as in Poser and if you want to look the same then render it in Poser. LuxRender has materials and capabilities that are impossible to be done it Poser and also has its own crap, any automatic conversion will not use the potencial of Lux and you are only wasting your time with very little results and a huge rendering time. I haven't seen any nice Lux rendering, with exception of Laurie, in all the pages in this thread, Poser 4 produce much better images.

What is needed is a two stage solution, the first stage is an geometry with basic materials exporter, it doesn't matter is within Poser or stand-alone, if it uses Python, Java, C or any other thing, it only matter to create the LuxRender files. The second stage is a scene editor, where you can set up the lights, cameras, use Lux materials and even position meshes in the scene. This can be done with a text editor as I am doing, or someone create a GUI to do it in a more friendly way.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but Poser seems to qualify for a scene editor already. All that's needed is the exporter and either a way to take the already existing shaders from that program into Lux or a way to edit them in a GUI much in the same manner as the LuxBlend or Reality exporters do. Editing the scene again after export seems to only further complicate the issue and, in a sense, forces us a step backward to how things were prior to this current exporter coming into being.

Yes, I agree with this. The idea is to use Poser (which we're all familiar with) to set up the scene to our liking. This would negate the need to re set the scene later, otherwise why even bring Poser into the loop? Poser should be the vehicle for scene setup and setting the texture-based materials and the exporter should take over in tweaking the materials for Luxrender and/or replacing them with a comparable native Luxrender material.

Hope that made sense...lol.

Laurie

well vue approximates the poser materials well enough to save all or nearly all tweaking.  and that is a time saver for people like me making comics with multiple panels. I would not use lux if I had to change every material.

Love esther

i think BB bought a new computer only to test out Lux renders. so i think he is taking this very serious.

Quote - well vue approximates the poser materials well enough to save all or nearly all tweaking.  and that is a time saver for people like me making comics with multiple panels. I would not use lux if I had to change every material.

Love esther

Vue uses Poser to do that. If you let Vue use Poser by checking the use shader tree and posing checkboxs. Otherwise No. It just imports as normal and you will have to tweek the materials.

Which is an idea. Is there a way to to the same thing with Lux. Have it use Poser for material settings as Vue does.

Actually I don't mind most of the way it imports when I don't check that box.  It's a good approximation.  occasionally I tweak but I don't have to.  And I have posted pics in the gallery with no tweaking and lots of people thought they were good.  yes some things are sometimes too shiny but that is just one little quick tweak if I even bother.

Love esther

maybe the first stepp should be that it imports bump,diffuse,specualar glossy and reflections.

Quote - Vue uses Poser to do that. If you let Vue use Poser by checking the use shader tree and posing checkboxs. Otherwise No. It just imports as normal and you will have to tweek the materials.

Which is an idea. Is there a way to to the same thing with Lux. Have it use Poser for material settings as Vue does.

That's because E-On has the Poser SDK from Smith Micro.  I'd like to be proved wrong but I can't see that being very cheap.  Lux would also need to have the SDK to get the same functionality

That makes sense.

The DAZ Studio SDK is readily available and free...

http://www.daz3d.com/i/shop/itemdetails/?item=9547

This reminds me of the IBM/MS OS war in the early 1990s.  IBM OS/2 was a much better Operating System than MS Windows at that time-in fact, OS/2 included a modified version of Windows 3 that was faster than straight Windows.  However, IBM charged $400 (IIRC) for thier SDK-Microsoft gave their's away free.  The rest is History..

why are you posting that here? this is a project for POSER. DS has Reality. the DS SDK is useless to this POSER project. it being for POSER after all.

well we were discussing whether or not the materials should be transferred over in a rough approximation and that is how the discussion got to this.

raises eyebrow and the SDK for DS helps how? thats like trying to unscrew a screw using a wrench instead of a screwdriver... wrong tool for the job.

There is always a conflict of interests. What for somebody is a fairly good approximation could look abysmal to somebody else, and in this case, given people go through the hassle of using Lux to get some more realism, I tend to think any approximation won't be good enough. IMHO.

I would love if Luxpose does a serious effort in importing Poser materials as precisely as possible, but I certainly want to be able to tweak them, for some Poser material hacks aren't needed in Lux, and Lux has nice features (I'd like to use) which have no Poser equivalent.

An import material translator will help you to get a rough material setting you can tweak afterwards, and as this it is precious (setting up dozens of materials from scratch would be very tedious), but it's not a final solution. A final solution would have to be hand-tweaked, else there is no real reason to use Lux (no pun intended) over Poser's Firefly.

well one would probably change the water to a water shader that came with lux but one would hope that all the clothes for the poser person and maybe their eyes, and hopefully their skin might be good enough transferred across.

Love esther

Metal, glass, mirrors you'll probably want to replace with native LuxRender materials. Glossy skins often turn out a bit too glossy, it would be good to have an option to mix in a bit of translucency and a bit of fuzziness. Most other materials already export quite well.

Yes Flenser, I agree, and that would be perfectly good.  But someone here suggested we did not want to transfer any materials over to lux.  that would be a sad shame.

i got so used to see every day a lot of news for Luxpose that its strange that its now so quet.

he he

Quote - Yes Flenser, I agree, and that would be perfectly good.  But someone here suggested we did not want to transfer any materials over to lux.  that would be a sad shame.

I don't think anyone said they wanted no materials transferred to Luxrender from Poser. Of course some will have to be transferred, like the texture based items and with an approximation of specular etc as it's set up in Poser. But for metals, water, glass, etc., it makes no sense but to use Luxrender's materials because they are superior to Poser's. And frankly, I feel that if you want everything to transfer over looking like Poser, well then use Poser.

Laurie

i think Luxpose could interepret the materials.

for example if you use 0,5 for reflection in posr why shouldnt it translate this setting into Lux?

or for example if you would set in poser the IOR for metal in poser. of course with the edge blend.

I would like to see it tranlate as best it can possibly do for all materials, then let the user change the materials that the user wants to.  It won't look like poser I don't think (if the results from the reality thing for DS are anything to go by)

Love esther

When it comes to the blender node, couldent we just "bake" the textures by using the numpy package's image prossesing and send the resulting image to luxrende. That is.. take

image=imageA/factor+imageB/(1-factor)

where factor is the blending nodes "blending" factor (0-1 or 3rd image)

Quote - When it comes to the blender node, couldent we just "bake" the textures by using the numpy package's image prossesing and send the resulting image to luxrende. That is.. take

image=imageA/factor+imageB/(1-factor)

where factor is the blending nodes "blending" factor (0-1 or 3rd image)

Lux Render already supports blending images. That's the Lux "mix" material. When the inputs are in the range 0 to 1 Poser Blender and Lux "Mix" are identical. The the material conversion I supplied already does this conversion.

They differ not in blending images, but how they blend other nodes - nodes that can produce hyper colors (less than 0 or more than 1). Images can't do that.

This is a problem for complex procedural materials - the kind I make every day.

Where do you learn anything about lux-materials? I tried luxrender these days, but did not find any substantial documentation about luxrender's materials except some parameter names in the lux scene file description. Otherwise any documentation on the topic seems to be like "Click here in the luxblend-gui and then the right thing will magically happen...". Is there some place where the lux scene file is documented, do i need to read the source, or am i looking in the wrong place (ie. is the knowledge in the PBRT-book or somewhere else?).

Attached Link: Luxrender Wiki