Quote - Hi all,

Can I open poser and Pose2Lux at the same time?

If I can, when I change something on Poser scene, would Pose2Lux dynamically change or I have to press some button to update the render of Pose2Lux?

Thanks in advance

It won't dynamically change in P2L, so you'd have to close it and then reopen it to catch the changes.  Not as bad as it sounds really, just a click of a button (if you have it set up that way).

You basically open Pose2Lux from within Poser. Tbh, I'd close Pose2Lux and then re-open/reload the scene in Pose2Lux after you've made your changes - and SAVED!! - in Poser, only just because of the way Python seems to work.

Attached Link: Pose2Lux v0.8.2

• Support for Poser 9 / Poser pro 2012 figures
• Bugfix: Correction to specular map output
• Bugfix: Fixed error when using hidden debug screen

Thanks SG... Wanna see the good work done? Here's one

is there a way to reduce the P2L window size, or something i can edit in the py? with the new layout i always have to make it shorter so i can get it all on the screen. i'm using a 23" monitor at 1280x768. by the way i like the new simplified screens now that i'm understanding better what stuff does. Thunderstone--nice render!

jancory, Thanks!!! but this one is even better....Mat wise...

I can't find 'Save Material Settings' in the v0.8.2 version.

I did not work with Pose2Lux for almost a month I guess so maybe I'm missing something that was already debated? I recognize the Materials tab has changed a lot but I cannot find it or something with my eyes has gone wrong... The 'Save settings' does not save the materials for me...

You need to look where the File menu is on the top... If you click on that Files link it will drop down the context menu... I know I had the same problem til I recalled clicking on the only item in the top menu bar.

Mhm I think it's now saved as 'Save Scene'...

Sorry I didn't remember to include that last tidbit... Yes, it's save scene. I did it to one of my renders and it saved the mat and every setting that I had for that particular scene.

Quote - Sorry I didn't remember to include that last tidbit... Yes, it's save scene. I did it to one of my renders and it saved the mat and every setting that I had for that particular scene.

Isn't Snarly just bloody brilliant! I am so in awe of the man.

Quick question. I just built a new workstation and was wondering it the video card is supported in Luxrender.

It is an Ati Firepro V8800

Thanks.

No reason it wouldn't be.  That card supports OpenCL, so you can use the hybrid renderer.  If it didn't, you could still use the sampler renderer of Luxrender.

Ok, ty... I still need to install a ton of stuff on it, then I can play...

Attached Link: Pose2Lux Pro v0.8.3

• Export button is now disabled until the current export has completed.
• New path added to the options screen - 'Scene files'. When saving Lux scene files this folder is used as the starting point for the 'select output file' dialog box.

Thanks, Snarly... - gotta get away from PP2012 long enough to start playing in Lux again!

Interesting.

And because you have a better technical understanding than I do, can I ask what conclusions should be drawn from these results?

Well, until now I made a "magnifying glass" mirror, you can change the magnification changing the refraction index or the focus distance of the paraboloid mesh. Next I can experiment with a curved plane and see what FX I get

Quote - I did some funny experiments. The scene is a figure, a simple plane with refraction index and a paraboloid mirror mesh behind the plane.

If you put a light at the focus of the parabaloid you could make an interesting custom spotlight...

Quote - > Quote - I did some funny experiments. The scene is a figure, a simple plane with refraction index and a paraboloid mirror mesh behind the plane.

If you put a light at the focus of the parabaloid you could make an interesting custom spotlight...

I think that with bidirectional surface integrator it must work

I'm very new to LuxRender, and I have a very basic question. What are the advantages of using LuxRender over the renderer in Poser 8? 

Also, I've installed the latest exporter and LuxRender, and tried a simple render using 1 V4 in clothes with hair. No background. I made no adjustments. And the render was taking FOREVER before I cancelled it off. Do they always take that long to render?

I have a rather speedy PC. 4G duo 64k.

Thank you.

JM

From the LuxRender web site.

Quote - LuxRender is a physically based and unbiased rendering engine. Based on state of the art algorithms, LuxRender simulates the flow of light according to physical equations, thus producing realistic images of photographic quality.

Poser 8 only produces photorealism through strict adherence to physics, which require that you get all the equations right yourself. Poser 8 is a general purpose render engine, and can also do non-photoreal, or stylized, rendering. LuxRender cannot do toons. Poser can. LuxRender cannot do Vargas. Poser can.

However, Poser doesn't do anything you don't tell it to do, so you have to know what you're doing.

Poser 8 is a "biased" rendering engine, meaning that it makes a lot of shortcuts and approximations in the interests of speed. LuxRender is unbiased, meaning that any shortcut that violates physics is not a candidate for inclusion.

Since no tricks are permitted in the interests of speed, LuxRender is really really slow.

24 to 72 hours is totally normal.

What's a 4G duo 64k? Sounds like a phone.

"24 to 72 hours is totally normal."

Sounds like I need a second PC just to render. I love the renders I currently get from Poser 8 using special lighting, AO, etc, with a bit of photoshopping. Although I do sell my renders via Etsy, most of my renders are mainly used for the graphic novels I create. So I can't imagine the renders from LuxRender will be worth it, not if they take 1-3 days.  

Thank you for the response. 

JM 

You should realize, however, that LuxRender can pause a render. You can stop it, and then pick up where you left off months later.

Rendering never "finishes". You run it until it seems good enough. The longer you run it, the more clean it gets.

With good technique and a fast machine, it's possible to render decent stuff in a couple hours.

I sleep, on average, about 2920 hours a year. During sleep, I also render, so it's actually reasonable to do my prep work in Poser, a few test renders, and then my final 80 hour masterpiece in LuxRender. Just an idea - I don't actually render anything but demonstrations, so I never really do this.

At that rate, I'd have 36 perfectly photorealistic images every year. That's way more than I've put in my gallery.

I try a few overnight and see how that works. Thanks.

The exporter works quite well, now I just have to learn about the materials, so that the renders do actually look good. 

I'm just getting into Lux and very excited about but I'm running into some roadblocks and hoping to get some help.

P8, Windows 7

I downloaded Poser2Lux, version 8, the non-open CL version, 64-bit.

Though the documentation clearly describes an "emitter" page with a left and right column with buttons that allow me to keep the emitter properties or change them, for the life of me I cannot find this, so I exported with all the emitter properties intact knowing this would screw up the results, but hey. So, where is that page?

I let it render for 12 hours, which I thought was more than adequate, but perusing some of the posts here, I realize it was not nearly enough time. No problem. I want to save my results as a jpeg or ping or whatever and the only thing I see is a print to clipboard option. I know, for an exceedingly brilliant person this is an exceedingly stupid question, but where is my clipboard? Where did my picture go?

Hi Shorterbus.

The manual is out of date. The Pose2Lux UI was recently redesigned and many UI elements are not where the old manual says they are.

I will rewrite the manual over the Winter so that it represents the current state of Pose2Lux but it's a big job and an unpaid one, so it won't be ready for a while.

Rather than leave Pose2Lux without any manual at all, I include the old one in the distribution. Much of it is still relevant, but you do have to expect to find some of the UI elements in different places now.

There is no longer an Emitters screen. Emitters can be configured on the Materials screen or the Lights screen (your choice).

By default, Luxrender saves a PNG image of the current render every 60 seconds. It is saved to the same folder to which the LXS scene file was saved (see  the 'Export to' input box on the Export screen). The interval can be changed on the Pose2Lux Export screen (Image Output panel). The PNG image will have the name specified in the 'Lux name' input box on the Export screen - the default is 'MyLuxScene.png'.

I am sorry the manual is out of date, but I'll do my best to answer any questions you have about the use of the script, either here or at Pose2Lux.com.

Attached Link: Pose2Lux 0.8.5

This update includes these changes:

• Output resolution is now included in the saved scene file
• Bugfix: Catmul-Clark subdivision settings are now read correctly from the saved scene file.

Snarlygribbly, I understand completely. It's good to know I wasn't halucinating.

And thanks for the 8.5 link.

This is a very impressive program and I can't wait to get a little more proficient at it.

When I imported my first scene there were lots of items, including a skin texture, that registered as an emitter - mostly jewelry. How do I change them to something else? And what do I change them too?

Poser materials are identified as emitters if the Ambient_Value in the PoserSurface of the material is greater than zero, so one way is to set the Ambient_value to zero before running Pose2Lux.

If there are many such materials it can be easier to change them in Pose2Lux:

• Run Pose2Lux
• Go to the MATERIALS screen
• Tick the 'Is an emitter' filter to quickly see all affected materials
• Check the USE button next to the 'Is an emitter' option - it will turn red.
• Ensure all the other USE buttons are unselected (grey).
• Select all the materials you don't want to be emitters. You can multiselect.
• Uncheck the checkbox next to the 'Is an emitter' USE button.
• Click the 'Assign' button at the bottom of the middle column
• You should find that all the affected materials have been removed from the display. Uncheck the 'Is an emitter' filter to see them again.

This sounds more complicated than it is. Try it and see.

Got it.

One last question: Am I using the same lights I import from Poser(8), or must I set up new lights?

Will IDL lighting work - which would include a skydome? If so, do I treat the skydome as an emitter?

I'll try and answer these questions from memory as I currently do not have access to Pose2Lux or Luxrender, having decided to go kayaking in Wales for a few days!

Anyway, yes - Pose2Lux will use the lights from your Poser scene. You can configure them further in P2L, and assign them to groups. Lights assigned to the 'ignore' group will not be exported to Luxrender. If you name the lights in Poser in the style of groupname:lightname then the light will automatically be assigned to the specified group, so you could (for example) make a light in Poser with the name ignore:light1 and it would light your scene in the preview window but be ignored by Lux - this can be quite handy!

IDL is a form of global illumination (GI) and as such is similar to how most of the Lux Surface Integrators work. The default Surface Integrator is 'Bidirectional' and that uses GI.

There are two ways to use a skydome in Pose2lux. One is to set it up as an emitter and then choose appropriate wattage, gain and efficiency settings for it. Better (in my opinion) is to assign the 'Skydome' material to it and let P2L sort everything out for you. The latter approach only works if you use a skydome which is a complete sphere with an appropriately mapped image (such as Bagginsbill's excellent free environmental sphere).

Snarlygribbly, thanks very much. Be safe!

New question:

• Poser offers a lot of channels (like Specular, Bump etc) to be filled in by various nodes

• Pose2Lux offers lists of material types, some of them take some channels from Poser to produce the material definitions as required by LuxRender

and now I'd like to find out (preferrably in some detail) which P2L material type combines which Poser channels in which way to get a specific LuxRender result.

What is the way to find out? There is no manual (yet) defining all the P2L material types in detail, and I have not found other resources too. I do hope I don't have to go the experimental road to find out.

In the meantime I found that most Gems do not take any Poser channel into account (Rubies are deep red whatever you tell Poser), that Basic Matte takes the Color / Diffuse channel but Glossy ignores the Poser color but takes the Specular instead. But what are the differences between the fice types of Matte (or Glossy) offered.

And so on. Where can I find the (build in) definitions?

Thanks in advance.

The built-in definitions have not been documented yet.

Some background:

I'm not expert (by any means) on materials but Pose2Lux obviously needed some defined, so I made some based on a little understanding, some educated guesswork and, well   ... some uneducated guesswork!

It was never the intention that the final version of Pose2Lux would stick with these initial definitions but they have remained so far because other work on Pose2Lux seemed more important.

Anyway ...

What this means is that there is no intention to document these temporary materials. I want to put together an online working group of those interested in the Pose2Lux materials and have the group help me make a new, definitive set of materials for the Pose2Lux Pro v1.0 release. Hopefully the group members would bring greater knowledge and understanding of materials to the revision of the materials than I am able to, and so ensure that the final version of Pose2Lux has a comprehensive and effective collection of matrerials in its libraries.

It is these final materials which will be documented in an Appendix to the manual.

But ...

Pose2Lux is open source, and the material definitions can be found in the code. I realise this is not ideal, but it may be a useful starting point for some.

The following comments use line number references from v0.8.5:

The material definitions begin on line 7622

There is the name of the material (e.g. "Basic/Matte") in the form of LibraryName/MaterialName.

This is followed by some data regarding backface generation (e.g. (False, 0)) and then the Luxrender material type (e.g. "matte")

What then follows is five boolean (True/False) values. It is these values which determine which Poser channels are used. In order, they are:

1. Use the imagemap plugged into the diffuse channel

2. Use the color data from the diffuse channel

3. Use the specular channel

4. Use the bump channel

5. Use the reflection channel

Also, some materials have additional, more specific definitions in the section ('LibIndices') starting at line 7770. Here you can find the names of the Pose2Lux materials followed by a series of statements which get added to the Luxrender material definition.

I'm happy to elaborate upon this if you want, and to answer any specific questions.

PS: Perhaps you'd be interested in being invited onto the working group?

Attached is an image of the Luxblend Mat Editor.

@Snarlygribbly

Thanks a lot, this helps (I hope). When I've figured it out, I'll share the results so other people can benefit too.

Yeah, I'happy to try to play some role in the group, although I can't be sure upfront that my customers will grant me the free time to really contribute. But let's give it a try.

@bantha

looks promising. My queste would be: how can one deploy the Poser materials in such a way that it gives good results in Poser (for preview) as well as in LuxRender (final run), without having to redefine all materials in the translation, since that is killing for large and complex scenes. Just building a new LuxRender materials library is not the best way to accompplish that, IMHO. But I don't know yet what is.

For my scenes, I see no possibility for automatic translation. I use the nodes quite a lot, I have more then just a few procedural nodes. Often, I combine two or three maps with blender nodes for bump or displacement, I don't see how that can be converted automatically. Also, Lux does not have procedurals like granite, clouds, fractals etc, so a relieable automatic conversion could just not work, IMHO.

Lux has better procedurals than Poser. But it lacks the same procedurals, so automatic conversion with any kind of fidelity is not possible. This caused my despair over the scale of the material problem. I consider the only solution (besides wholesale material substitution of materials as you're doing now) is to rewrite LuxRender to include exactly the nodes we have in Poser. This is not impossible, but I have no time for it, and it would require cooperation from SM.

@bantha

when transporting 3D scenes to other environments , things get lost in translation. Like working in 3DS MAX where you've got to pick your renderer first (Mental Ray, VRay, ...) in order to use the right material lib upfront. And don't dare to change afterwards.

Losing in translation happens to Poser too, when transporting into:

• Daz Studio
• LuxRender via Pose2Lux
• LuxRender via Daz Studio > Reality plugin
• Bryce
• Bryce via the Daz Studio bridge
• POV via PoseRay
• Pandromeda's mojoWorld
• Vue while keeping the Poser materials tree
• Vue while establishing a Vue materials tree
• Photoshop using its 3D editing tools
• and so on (any route via Blender, ...)

Since the only thing that counts is the final 2D result, and "getting a good , close to physical reality raytracing device" is a sensible way to go, a proper understanding of what gets lost and how to minimize damages can be of help.

As picking one route, building a new materials library and reassign all materials, helps too.

Both are good answers, but to quite different questions. The proper answer to one unfortunately does not answer the other, and vice versa.
My current question is the first: what gets lost in translation when deploying Pose2Lux and which material-types do I have to pick in there to minimize the damage. That's why I'm after the "translation dictionary". And preferrably, one for each serious route / translation destiny.

Pose2Lux has a very simplistic relationship with the Poser Material room.

Basically, it uses only the PoserSurface data, ignoring ALL nodes connected to it other than image maps. As far as Pose2Lux is concerned we're back to Poser 4 technology in the Material room.

Trying to interpret the Poser shader tree is futile. There are too many nodes which have no correspondence in Luxrender. And for a shader tree to be meaningful, you'd need to be able to interpret all of the nodes, not just some.

As an aside, I'm not at all sure that BB's idea of rewriting Luxrender would be desirable even if someone were to undertake the task. If Luxrender could accurately replicate the functionality of the clay node, the diffuse node etc., wouldn't we just be turning Luxrender into a Firefly emulator with all its biased nodes like 'Blinn' etc.?

Anyway, early on I decided that the best approach was to let the human operator decide on the material conversions and to have Pose2Lux just do a rudimentary conversion to give them a bit of a start. All my efforts were put into making that process as easy as possible.

And that's one of the reasons that we have the material library system - I guessed most users would prefer to just pick a material from a list than have to design one from scratch for nearly every material in the scene. Becasue Poser has such a wealth of ready-made content the scenes do tend to have much more complexity than those typically seen built in Blender and rendered in Lux, and to make materials for everything would be onerous.

Of course ,I also made sure that those who wanted to craft all their own materials could still do so via the XML functionality. More recently I've added in a custom material editor, albeit with only very basic support for making materials.

The main strategy will remain that of providing a comprehensive ready-made material library. This Winter I'll be asking for help from the community to help me build such a library for Pose2Lux. If there's a good response then this project still has the potential to be a great success, I think.

@Bantha: I did study the Luxblend code carefully before I started Pose2Lux. To be frank, it was too complex for me to understand! It also seemed to be tied heavily to functionality already built into Blender. Given the stated intent of providing a material library as the main strategy for facilitating conversions, I gave up on the idea of taking code from Luxblend.

Important note: Pose2Lux is open source - anybody can make changes to it. If anyone wanted to develop parts of Pose2Lux they'd find me very helpful and ready to explain how the existing code base works.

I enjoy working on Pose2Lux, but I'm not precious about it!

I was never saying implement Blinn - that's where you don't want to replicate.

But - how about Clouds, Spots, fBm, Fractal_Sum, Cellular, Noise, Tile, Brick, etc. These are just mathematical patterns and are the reason we can't port.

How about Math, Color_Math, Blender, Fresnel_Blend - these, also, are just math and do not exist in Lux.

Luxish analogies to Blinn would be used instead of Blinn, but there is nothing whatsoever that makes Poser's Clouds node inferior or superior to LuxRender's Clouds node (which is actually Blender's Clouds node). The difference is arbitrary, but if you worked out a shader pattern using Poser nodes, you can't get them to work in Lux, regardless of whether they are better or worse.

Sorry to go a bit off track here..

I decided to try Lux and downloaded it...at least I think I got everything. Got the manual and it tells me that there is a Simple and Advanced interface, but mine only has the advanced, and I can't find anywhere to go to Simple. The File button doesn't have it either and it's the only button on there. I thought I had figured out how to export, save scene, etc. But when I tried to load the scene to render, nothing happened.

I don't know what to do now.:unsure:

Quote - The manual is out of date. The Pose2Lux UI was recently redesigned and many UI elements are not where the old manual says they are.I will rewrite the manual over the Winter so that it represents the current state of Pose2Lux but it's a big job and an unpaid one, so it won't be ready for a while.
Rather than leave Pose2Lux without any manual at all, I include the old one in the distribution. Much of it is still relevant, but you do have to expect to find some of the UI elements in different places now.

There is no longer an advanced and a simple interface - the UI was redesigned completely so that all controls are available in a single interface.

I'm happy to help resolve your problem though. I need to know a little nore information - did Luxrender open? Was it able to find you scene file? What entries were made in the log?

I can answer questions in this thread, at www.pose2lux.com, via sitemail or by one of those instant messenger things that I struggle to get the hang of :-D

Lux did open. It found the scene file once I figured out I had to make one...lol. As for a log, I've no idea where that is found.