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!

 

Free stuff @ https://poser.cobrablade.net/