Whilst I have reservations about starting what must seem a competitive thread to Laurie's fine Pose2Lux Questions and Answers thread, it's quite obvious from reading the posts in that thread that the questions being presented were asked by individuals who've already done a fair bit of work with this tool, or with its predecessor. Introducing total newb questions into that mix would slow the direction of the thread, which is why I decided to start this one.

Also, this thread is not intended to take the place of the fine User's Guide so close to being published. One could take it as the ramblings of a wannabe who feels the enticement of a new option for rendering a scene, one that will give better detail, better lighting, and so on.

The enticement is offset by the challenge of a new approach to materials. It's a bit like going from procedural to object-orientation: everything suddenly changes, and you can't draw on your experience. Indeed, your experience will actually hold you back (a bit like going from Poser to Daz Studio, or vice-versa).

So, the first thing one looks at is: what do I want to render in Luxrender? Well, sheesh, everything! Should I start by trying to do an entire scene? Probably not.

I'll start tomorrow with a really simple scene... and go from there.

My suggestion? Set up something simple with a few different kinds of materials: skin, shiny things, dull things, some glass, etc. and see what the Pose2Lux Luxrender mat presets look like. Then, when you have things in Luxrender, play with it's settings and see what they do. You can always start over (and you will, more than once....lol). And it's fun!

ps: I have this weird fascination with turning lights on and off in Luxrender as it's rendering...lol. Simple amusement for a simple mind ;).

Laurie

Thanks Laurie... will do as you suggest, and will be posting my experiences here.

Turning lights on and off? during a render? This is a whole new renderer, isn't it... sheesh! Firefly has a bit of catching up to do, I reckon... being left in the dust. :blink:

Yep, you can turn the lights on and off while it's rendering...lolol. It's quite - mesmerizing...lmao.

Laurie

and you can pause and resume renders, even save them, exit lux, do something else, then reload lux and then the render and carry on :D

To save a render in Luxrender:

Go to File/Save FLM

Give your file a name and save it.

To resume a render in Luxrender:

Open Luxrender and go to File/Resume FLM. First, it will ask you to load the .lxs file and then once that's chosen, the .flm file for it. After loading, the render will resume where you left off.

When exiting Luxrender, always choose File/Save and Exit. Note that with some very complicated scenes with a lot of geometry, it may take awhile for Luxrender to write the .flm.

Laurie

Thank you for all those pointers, Laurie and Magnus.

So, I pretty much set up my scene by pretty much removing all shaders and leaving only colourMaps and bumpMaps. No connections anywhere to Alt_anything. Took out the building, simplified to BB water shader to just a colour, and had the poor girl stand nude in the water wondering what had become of her dress. So: Charlotte / Koz's bob, clothPlane with colour and skyDome. 3 lights: IBL, pointlight (sun) and specular light.

In Pose2Lux, went with 'analyse scene', and assigned default materials. The sun was the pointlight, the sky was IBL. Left other values to whatever the default was.

Brought up LuxRender, which, to my surprise, started rendering immediately after I chose the scene. The output was rubbish. So, no makeArt button here either. As in good-ol' time-honoured tradition, tried to go with defaults and created rubbish.

Time to hit the books.

Okay, second go ... I noticed that the cornea and eye surface had been assigned an emitter property by default. Not sure why that is or how to get rid of it.

I've done as Laurie has suggested and changed the pointlight to a infinite, and restored the IBL (intensity 25%) and got rid of the specular light.

Oh! I think I know what is giving the cornea emitter status: ambient_value in my original shader. Changed that real quick to 0. No render yet, kids... at least, nothing to look at, really.

Yeah, the exporter will try and pick materials for you, but you're much better off chosing them yourself ;)

Hopefully, you didn't detach your image map nodes?

Oh, and you can't use a skydome....yet. It'll block the light from your sun ;)

Laurie

There is an emitters panel in the exporter. Go there after you've assigned your materials and make sure that NO skin is in the window on the left. If it is, highlight all the skin material zones and transfer them to the window on the right. If you don't have any mesh-based emitters in your scene, push the red button and disable emitters altogether. There's an example of what I'm talking about in the user guide.

Laurie

Hmmmm, noticing some odd behaviour... if I am editing my scene whilst Pose2Lux is open, certain things don't seem to work. Like, I added a light by mistake. So, it was selected, right? But the little rubbish bin in the light widget didn't show until I closed Pose2Lux. Also, in the mat room, when copying and pasting a shader (on I fixed), the new shader didn't display (values or colour or anything) until I clicked on the value or colour.

Not sure what's up with that.

Oh! Okay - deleting the skyDome... sheesh, I'll miss that... it provides the piccie for my backdrop. As in clouds -n- stuff.

ah. poser limitation : you get unpredictable results trying to edit the scene in poser while it's running a Python file. 

You need to close Pose2Lux if you change something in the scene. If you don't want to lose your material choices, save your scene materials (File/Save scene materials) before you close it. Then, make your change, restart P2L and analyze the scene. Then load the saved materials. Don't forget to change/assign materials from anything new in the scene.

Laurie

Quote - Oh! Okay - deleting the skyDome... sheesh, I'll miss that... it provides the piccie for my backdrop. As in clouds -n- stuff.

Snarly's workin' on it...lol.

Laurie

Okay, approaching all this a bit more thoughtfully. Have set Inf(85%) and IBL(25%) as sun and sky. Figured out how to save stuff, so I'm not reinventing the wheel each time (I'm a slow learner, hence the "challenged" in the topic title :blink: ). The render is looking a bit better, except for the shadow areas, like under her chin. So, in LuxRender, the settings are: Linear kernel, Sens: 100, Exp: 1/500, FStop: 16 (set that to 8 - weirds me out how Lux just keeps on chugging away despite what you do...) gamma 2.2.

So far?

So, I guess the stuff under her chin disappears, eventually? Or maybe I need to play with shadows... for the lights.

set reduce fireflys to 2 on the export panel ;)

Thanks, Magnus... will do.

The bright spots are called fireflies; they are the inevitable artifact of unbiased renderers and, unless there are bugs, they slooooooooooooo.........oooooly disappear. Creating less of them and killing them faster is an ongoing research subject in the field of unbiased rendering.

I have seen some suggestions about killing them with postprocessing; I will do some experiments in the weekend and will report the results.

Dear RobynsVeil, more than learning you will have to un-learn dastardly tricks required by scanline renderers or half-baked raytracers like Firefly. Unbiased renderes strive to simulate the real life process of image formation. Just as an example, some time ago I was reading a document about Maxwell renderer (one of the big boys of the field) and it stated that, in the model of the "camera" you are using to "shoot" the "picture", you can select the shape of the shutter...

erm Alex?

in Luxrender .8 a setting known as "Reduce Firefly's" was introduced and on 2 or 3 removes them completely. (you can set it to 10, but I've never had to do that

EDIT http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/New_User_Tips_and_Tricks#Fireflies the relevant setting. P2L has a setting for this on the export page)

Actually, it hasn't, yet. This is with Reduce Fireflys set to 5:

ah on her skin there?

how long has that been baking?

Does anybody know where i can get BBwater shader?. All I can find is a pic of the material room of the shader. Im afraid to duplicate it myself because it looks a little confusing. Is there a material file anywhere?

Almost two hours, and no improvement.

Quote - Hmmmm, noticing some odd behaviour... if I am editing my scene whilst Pose2Lux is open, certain things don't seem to work. Like, I added a light by mistake. So, it was selected, right? But the little rubbish bin in the light widget didn't show until I closed Pose2Lux. Also, in the mat room, when copying and pasting a shader (on I fixed), the new shader didn't display (values or colour or anything) until I clicked on the value or colour.

Not sure what's up with that.

Hi Robyn, welcome aboard!

Pose2Lux is intended to be used similarly to the Poser render screen - while you're using it you can't make any changes to the Poser scene. When Pose2Lux is run most ordinary Poser 'events' don't get processed until Pose2Lux closes, when they all get processed at once! Best to treat Pose2Lux as 'modal' even though it hasn't been programmed that way.

Skydomes are tricky ... very tricky. It doesn't help that there are a gadzillion of them out there, all with different UV mappings'n'stuff. Some have changed the internal name of the rotation dials too, which means Pose2Lux can't find out which bit of the sky to show.

I have it working with BB's free hemisphere. That works just grand. I think I might have to limit Pose2Lux's support to just BB's hemisphere or dome, or any other skydome with matching UV implementation.

Here is a test render from version 0.8.6 (not uploaded yet) showing the output from a scene using BB's hemi. The lighting isn't great because the sky map is a JPG, but you get the idea. Pose2Lux will work better with an HDR image attached to the hemi, of course.

Quote - Almost two hours, and no improvement.

This doesn't look like fireflies to me, just a shadowed area that hasn't yet received enough samples per pixel to remove the noise.

The length of time for the render isn't the key data - more relevant is the samples per pixel (S/p) value, shown in the statistics bar at the bottom of the Luxrender screen.

Your scene has a lot of water in it which may be taking a lot of computation, thereby reducing the rate at which S/p increases. If you've used the water from the Pose2Lux libraries then this will certainly be what's happening because it is 'real' water, not just a water-coloured surface. Luxrender water needs to be bounded, i.e. have a river/sea bed, shore, banks or whatever or (a) it won't look right at all and (b) will take ages to calculate because it is effectively infinitely deep :-)

I wouldn't expect those shadow areas to clear up much until you get to around 400 S/p or so.

Ironically, if I'm right then setting 'Reduce fireflies' to 5 will only make matters worse because that involves additional calculations which slow down the render, and slow down the reate at which S/p increases.

Quote - Does anybody know where i can get BBwater shader?. All I can find is a pic of the material room of the shader. Im afraid to duplicate it myself because it looks a little confusing. Is there a material file anywhere?

Is this for use in Luxrender or firefly?

As great as BB's water shader is for use in Firefly, it won't give good results in Luxrender.

I can make more Luxrender water materials which are suitable for water which is not clear, like lake or pond water. They are not distributed with Pose2Lux because they require the use of tabbed data files and I didn't want to confuse people!

You'll need a Skydome material in XML format to make use of the feature. Here'a simple one:

I'll build this material into Pose2Lux for the next proper update.

So, make a scene with BB's EnvHemisphere (NOT EnvDome), make an XML file with the above material in it and load it into Pose2Lux, apply the 'Skydome' material to the Skydome in the Materials screen and it will all work very nicely.

It might work on other skydomes too, but only if they are compatible with the EnvHemisphere.

Actually, I've just packaged up 0.8.6 with the Skydome material built in, just to make it easier for ya. See main Pose2Lux thread for download details.

i'd like to make a clarification about my posts.

I own Vue 9 Infinite so I already have a pretty professional rendering solution for Poser content; my personal quest is to check whether, using LuxRender, I can get a better Quality/Render Time trade off w.r.t. to Vue.

On the other hand, I assume that most of the readers of this thread do not own Vue 9: for you, Pose2Lux/LuxRender is nothing short of a dream; you just have to learn patience.

Your only free (as beer) alternatives are the PoseRay/POV-Ray path (not trivial and POV-Ray is starting to lag behind w.r.t. to render quality) or the convoluted export-to-OBJ/Blender/LuxBlend/LuxRender path (typical of open source advocates let's-flail-ourselves "workflow").

The Vue way requires at least the 3D Import module (129$) and the Render Up module (69$) so it is a 198$ thing (or something similar using other versions, there are as many Vue bundles as stars in the sky!).

Other stuff means Lightwave/Modo/Maxwell Render/V-Ray (and 4 digit price tags).

The thing I read about fireflies elimitation is based upon the idea that fireflies are apparently always brighter than what they should and appear in different places in different render runs so, instead of creating e.g. one 500S/p render, you create 2 250S/p ones, with all parameters equal and then blend the two images in a program like GIMP using the Darken Only overlay mode: this way, you select, pixel per pixel, the darker of the two. Fireflies should go away. As I wrote, I will experiment and report.

P.S.: dear Snarlygribbly, your release speed makes Blender development look like a snail!

Okay, wee update. I'm finally getting my pea-brain around the idea that I have to sort-of wait a bit for things to happen. Like the shadows which I thought were noisy (fireflies??), but no... they just hadn't had time to be fully processed. Thanks for your notes on this.

So, an hour into the render, we're at this:

So, a lot of playing yet to do... and sheesh, the lights / materials / options! You could get a Uni degree on this.

So far, I've "exported" 3 scenes created in PoserPro 2010 to LuxRender via Pose2Lux. This programme promises great things, the most important being opening Poser user's views to consider alternative render options to Firefly: they are out there! LuxRender is but one of many.

My workflow has been typically this (no different, really, to what I already do): go first into the material room after everything's been set up and posed before invoking Pose2Lux. You will find that most of your materials need simplifying. About the only node that seem to have much use at this point (and I'm happy to be corrected on this by ThoseThatKnow) is the ImageMap, preferentially connected to the Diffuse_Color channel on PoserSurface or the Bump channel. Those two give the most consistent results. Actually, no idea where bump really plays much of a role, since the Pose2Lux material presets may affect that... don't know. There are still several unknowns about what actually comes across and what doesn't. Safest bet seems to be: get the ImageMap right, and chose your materials from what Pose2Lux has to offer.

So, now to have a closer look at the current list of materials in Pose2Lux.

Oh, and current render (5 hours in):

Gorgeous lighting on the architecture. Someday you might give PoseRay+Kerkythea a try. You have a choice of several biased  & unbiased render modes - might be faster as well. Be interesting to see how the quality compares. Looking good, Keep it up!

Thanks, LMckensie. I actually have had a play with Kerkythea quite some time ago (before the fork) but it had issues with transmapped hair which were never fully resolved. I was as much a nuisance on their forum as I am here :lol:

I'd be happy to give PoseRay/POVRay another go... it's been a while.

Ah, that was you :-) The Poseray->Kerkythea exporter does the basics pretty well. Haven't messed too much with Poser figures though - I prefer Vue but since I got network rendering working with Kerky, I'm playing with it a bit more on occasion. POVRay is long in the tooth but it's still a solid render engine depending on your needs. I can 'happily' spend hours figuring out why an API call isn't working or tweaking a multi-table SQL join, but I'll leave the serious Island of Dr. Moreau Poser interbreeding to you - you're good at it!

If anybody tries POV-Ray I advise to get 3.7; though it is marked as Release Candidate is OK and quite faster then 3.6.

Quality wise, Lux (obviously) blasts POV-Ray but POV-Ray might still have its place if you plan to add POV-specific code to the scene in addition to Poser exports (a naked Vicky surrounded by isocacti?)

Personally, being by now comfortable with tools like Vue, Blender, Wings3D and SketchUp, have shelved POV-Ray under the fond-memories category.

As far as I know Kerkythea development is, using a DAZ-ism, "on hold" as (understandably) its developers are focused on the commercial Thea engine.

Attached Link: http://www.kerkythea.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=84944

they announced an update to Kerkythea - Echo Boost - Yesterday.

*"Dear friends,

it has been a (very) long time since Kerkythea 2008 (3 whole years). You know that we are not going to abandon Kerkythea; it was and is a work made with a lot of love. Even more, we have high respect towards the KT community that made KT the way it is; a powerful, easy to use, standalone, free renderer. I still remember the first days, when the software had only a small window with a few buttons and one render mode. These were really days of great significance that changed the future.

And so, here we are! We have good news for next KT update! There is a new version being under testing right now. The new version does not come with any changes (with respect to the user interface or render engines) but it comes with 2 significant improvements: 64-bit builds and speed increase of 50% or more! This is why, we decided to call the new build "Echo Boost".

We are very happy about the new version and we will make this available as soon as possible.

best wishes"*

That's good news. I like Kerky too ;).

Laurie

Oh cool! Thanks for the heads-up, Magnus!

Thanks Magnus - I won't even mention Dextromethorphan :-) The SketchUp->Kerkythea plugin seems to work pretty well so a new version of K will be an excuse for more google warehouse rummaging.

Thanks alexcoppo. I'll probably stick with 3.6 for now since I don't use it that much, but I did see HTTPov which I hadn't noticed before. I may give it a try since I never could get SMPov to work.

Sick in bed, which is giving me an excellent opportunity to re-read all those 'old' LuxPose posts again. Yeah, the code is still above my head, but there's a lot of ideas on how to get Pose2Lux really working beautifully.

Quote - they announced an update to Kerkythea - Echo Boost - Yesterday.

...somebody keeping his promises... a cold spell is coming in hell. Anyway, thanks a lot for having corrected me.

Bye!!!

Back to Pose2Lux... a few discoveries and more questions.

I'm finding scene prep is a big time-sink in this. Since I don't really know which nodes are supported at this point, I'm pretty much staying with ImageMaps and a few anisotropic and Blinn nodes... that's it.

Until I can reliably use OpenCL, CPU rendering with an i3 is slow. Very slow. 2hours and 30 minutes for only 56 S/p (samples/pixel). Which is fine, but keep that in mind when deciding you want to try this.

This scene is probably a bit complex: it's Stonemason's "Streets of the Mediterranean" - one huge prop I decided to leave intact, V4, Nerd 3D's Joan dress, forget-who's Isabel hair and earrings and Idler268's candy sandals. Wouldn't you know it: the Mediterranean set had a LOT of displacement stuff throughout. Yeah, I know I could have just ticked a box in Pose2Lux, but that wouldn't have satisfied my OCD, so I went through the process of modifying each and every material zone. Yep, labour of love. Heaps of material zone in this prop.

V4 has already been done, the Joan dress took only a moment, same for the hair and the shoes, but here questions arose. Is the reflective channel input supported? I would think that the sphereMap node wouldn't be, so what to plug in there if it is, I wonder. Here is where getting a better feel for what those lovely xml files create in terms of Lux materials would be quite beneficial.

Need to have a read, I suppose.

So, still only 61 samples/pixel after 3 hours, 40 minutes:

If you wish to appreciate that resolution, click on the image.

Going to see what's out there on creating those materials.... any pointers are welcome!

While it is still only at 60-odd s/p, that is shaping up to be lovely, I couldn't imagine doing all those materials.  Well I can as I am trying to strip down the materials on some fairly large scenery at the moment myself, another Stonemason set.  I am questioning my sanity after reading your description Robynsveil.

The reflection question is a good one, or which lux materials handle reflection in them already to be picked apart and pawed through.  Maybe I can even wrap my numb brain around some of it. Okay, may be over rating my ability here with numberish things, but I can try and bang my head on my desk with the best of 'em.

Also, here would be another question, is there anyway that anyone may know to desaturate the colours in a texture in Lux?  (I usually us Bagginsbill's albino shader on a character I would love to do a picture of in Lux, but obviously that isn't going to work).  I know, I want to run before I crawl.  LOL.

You and I are singing off the same page, Rhionon.

Workflow for working those Stonemason shaders in Poser (and the mat room) was this:

set Diffuse_Color to white (if not already so)
Set Diffuse_Value to .8

... which of course brought up questions, because very often, the diffuse_color was like IColor(91,91,91) or a shade of grey with diffuse_value at 1. So, if you figure that grey is some percentage of white, and then I did a 91/255 * 100 = 35 (or .35) to give me a number diffuse_value might need to be... well, that didn't work right, for some reason. So, I'm lost, I just went and set color to white and value to .8, in the end. More than willing to be told off on this point by those-that-know - it seems we covered this somewhere in the distant past, but memory fails.

Then I plug the colourMap (ImageMap) into that diffuse_color channel. For all textures except those involving transmaps, I set filtering to None. No idea if that has any bearing on LuxRender or not. I know it's important to do for the Firefly renderer.
When I have a material the way I want it - and there's actually a few other things I do - I save the shader as an mt5 in a folder in my Materials library. That way, you'll see a picture of it to so you can use it later... which you will. Turns out there's only a dozen or so textures for like this whole scene. He's pretty clever, that Stonemason. Bump is left there, displacement is disconnected.

For desaturating a Poser colour, I'd be using the hsv node. However, testing in Lux has shown it isn't translated/recognised... only the fewest nodes are. I'm scrounging around to get some idea of how to build a shader in xml... going to start by finishing that LuxPose thread first.

Oh, up to 71 samples/pixel... and thank you for the kind words, Rhionon!

Okay, just messing around in the LuxRender forum and saw the "material" for jade, in lxm format? Which would be like xml? Sort-of? Am I on to something here? I feel like I do need to read the rest of that LuxPose thread, but I'm way too excited! What a goldmine!!

Right. Digging right into this: they had some neat piccies of the different materials on the wiki so you'd have an idea what they looked like, but no description or clue how to make these work for what we're doing.

Good beginning. Looked all over the wiki, and finally, under the developer's section, found something that looked a bit more promising: the definition of the .lxs scene files:

An .lxs file is an ASCII text file with a full description of the scene to be rendered. As scene descriptions can get quite large, there is a mechanism to break the scene description down into more manageable pieces: the description can be spread over several text files.

The ones I'm interested in are these:

A main scene file with extension '.lxs'. For example: 'scene.lxs'
*An included Material file with suffif '-mat' and extension '.lxm'. For example: 'scene-mat.lxm'*particularly the latter. HUGE question: when we get those xml files, how are they related to these lxm??

Looking at the wiki now where LaurieA explains some of the tricks of the trade with regards to editing/making materials. Clever lass, that LaurieA. I'm envious!

Curious about those paint parameters:

"float uroughness" [-0.258086156304]

"float vroughness" [0.258086156304]

How the heck did they come up (you come up with??) those numbers? trial and error?

Oh, and under Mixes, I see leather, and reference to some Blender procedurals, which I'm sort-of familiar with. Now it starts to sort-of tie together a bit. A wee bit. :biggrin:

Jeez, this programme is fun! We're up to 8 hrs, 35 min and I've messed with the lights and exposure settings and f-stop, and now things don't look so flat. Just shy of 80 samples/pixels --still:

Please be aware: the linked file is big. But you can't really appreciate the low sample/pixel issue without it.

Some time ago, someone asked if one could display images that looked like they weren't done in Poser. I've rendered this in Poser first - hardly took any time at all, even with IDL and everything, but yeah... it looked like it. This still has the characteristics - V4 is a dead give-away - but I dunno... something about the lighting: Bagginsbill's skydome never looked so good. And you can't even see it! It's just there, painted with that last piccie of yours, Laurie... the sunset one? Really has that evening feeling. Current LuxRender settings are:

Lamp Gain 30
Default Gain .85
Sensitivity 100
Exposure 1/60 (was 1/500)
FStop 8
Gamma 2.2

Don't know enough to fiddle with the other stuff, so I won't. Yet.

Quote - Curious about those paint parameters: "float uroughness" [-0.258086156304]

"float vroughness" [0.258086156304]

How the heck did they come up (you come up with??) those numbers? trial and error?

Found it, I think:

Something ya'll may not know and I'm not sure if it's been mentioned before or if it's even come up yet:

A friend and I found out something about tiling textures from Poser and how Luxrender interprets them. Poser divides a map in order to tile it. Luxrender multiplies it. So, in Luxrender - from a direct export from Poser where the tiling is 10x10 - you'd get "float vscale" [-0.10000000] and "float uscale" [0.1000000]. If you leave it like this, you'll get a white texture in Luxrender. If, however, you change that to "float vscale" [-10.0] and "float uscale" [10.0] you'll get your proper tiling.

Some examples:

If your tiling from Poser is listed as .05, change it to 20.0
If your tiling from Poser is listed as .2, change it to 5.0
If your tiling from Poser is listed as .5, change it to 2.0

and so on ;o).

Laurie

So, I'll just finish reading and shut up for now...