Having seen the results by others of using Reality for Poser, I decided to buy it. After setting up the Software and Luxrender, I tried it out on some of my already created scenes. I was very disappointed. I left a couple to run for an hour or more and the result was still pretty crude.

I have followed the guide, but it seems I am doing something wrong. Can anyone help.

Chances are you didn't let it run long enough. That seems to be the most common reason. down at the bottom look for where it had time and such and look for s/p (samples per pixel). the number before that needs to be at least 500. Depending on your scene, you may need to let it go to 1 or 2k s/p.  A lot of reflections or glass will make it need a longer render.

take a look at the Eff(iciency) parameter at the statistics. It should be >100% otherwise your lighting levels are too low.

Luxrender shoud be taken as a camera: when the ISO is low and/or the fStop is small (= high value) and/or there is little light in the scene, it takes a long time to get the film sufficiently exposed = to grain out of the render.

Use the lighting tab to raise light levels and/or auto-settings to get an idea of the ISO/fStop settings for your lighting.

Just to benchmark, what are your statistics on the watch (luxtime) scene that comes with the LuxRender package (or can be downloaded from there). On my machine: 1166% Eff, producing 84 kSamples/second (= 84.000/(800x600) =0.175 samples/pixel per second on a 800x600 image) so it will take 500/0.175 = 2850 sec = 47,5 minutes to reach the 500 samples/pixel quality requirement. I'm running 6 cores = 12 threads @ 4GHz.

Hi.

Can you tell us what exactly is the issue?

Btw, it's best, while you learn how to use th program, to follow the Reality User's Guide and build new scenes as described, instead of using existing scenes.

In that way you will gradually learn the feature of the program and understand how it differs from the Firefly render. What I can tell you is that you will get more realistic results with Reality and LuxRender than with the default Poser rendering. It's just a matter of understanding the software and using it as designed.

if you have specific questions please don't hesitate asking.

It is a plain fact that most Luxrender renders will run you hours if not nearly a day on average to get a good image. It's not Luxrender's fault. It's the way unbiased rendering works when using CPU. It's very slow. It's superior to Poser's Firefly 60% if the time, but it's slow.

Laurie

Don't forget though, on long renders, if you do not want to leave the machine running overnight you can resume the render at another time.  Another advantage that Luxrender has and a feature I would like to see in Poser.

deejay - I agree with what everyone else has said. Lux will simply take longer than Poser for renders, but typically the results are worth the wait. I took a quick look at your gallery here, and the lighting set up in many (most??) of your renders would take quite a while to clear up in Lux, especially if you just let Reality convert your Poser Lights to Lux lights.

When working with Reality/Lux you need to set up your lighting like a photo studio. Using the mesh lights that come with reality is a great way to start. You can use Poser lights, and let Reality convert them to Lux lights, but while learning Reality/Lux it's best to keep your lighting setups simple.

One simple rule of thumb with the mesh lights is if you want softer shadows either increase the size of the mesh light, or add a low intensity fill light. If you want harder, more defined shadows, reduce the size of your mesh light. Note: mesh lights are meshes in your Poser scene that have been turned into light emitters - you can make your own lights by turning any object in the scene into a light emitter in the Reality3 materials editor.

How long it takes for Lux to "bake" a scene to perfection depends on a lot of factors including; number and types of lights, lighting setup, materials used (reflective, caustics, and SSS mats, translucent mats will all increase render times), number and complexity of objects in the scene, and scene set up. This is all covered in the excellent Reality manual .... it really is worth the time it takes to read it.

Keep in mind that Lux is a completely different renderer than Firefly. Reality does an excellent job of converting Poser/Firefly materials and lights to Lux, but like any extremely complex conversion, there is only so much that can be automated. To get the best results the user needs to learn how to optimize everything in Poser for Reality3 and then in Reality3 for Lux. Reality does a fantastic job in conversion, and often needs little or no manual editing, but it is virtually impossible to converte all the extremely complex shaders found in a lot of content to Lux materials, so user intervention in the material editor will be needed at some point, especially if you want to get jaw-dropping results on every render.

For reference with regard to how long renders take with Reality3/Lux (keep in mind I'm a novice, not an expert), I have 3 images in my gallery that I did with Reality3/Lux (Laptop with a quadcore i7 running at 2.3ghz). My very first render I did Reality3/Lux (titled A Simple Test - http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2429494) took about 4 hours as I recall. It's a great example of what Reality3/Lux is capable of "right out of the box" - I didn't change a thing in Reality - just hit render frame and sent it straight to Lux. The 2nd image (titled Jungle Queen - http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2434136) I used the sun light included with Reality 3, linear tone mapping,  ISO 100, shutter speed 1/500, fstop 5.6. SSS was enabled for the skin shaders with a slight modification to the default SSS colors, and the gold metal bits were set to gold in Reality - polish reduced to 4500, with no other shader modifications. Rendered on a quadcore i7 laptop for approx. 18 hours, 650 s/p (didn't have to go that long, just left it running while at work on 14 hour workday, probably would have been fully cooked at about 6-8 hours). The third image (titled Castel Mage - http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2440008) I did a bit more materials editing than the previous two, and it had a more complex light setup and a lot of geometry using one of StoneMason’s scenes (keep in mind that reality will calculate ray traces on everything in your scene - not just what is visible on your camera), and it took about 70 hours (long render time partially because of my light setup and because I didn't remove parts of the scene that were off camera).

Hope all this helps a bit – based on what I’ve seen in various discussions and galleries, you can get fairly fast renders out of Lux (2-4 hours) with careful attention to scene setup, shaders, and lighting.

Good Luck!!

I may be doing something wrong, but haven't seen this stated anywhere.

I set my seen in poser get a reality light, do the whole thing, but lux renderer doesn't render the whole scene just a very close portion of it, like as if I had chosen area render instead of the whole thing...very bizarre.

Poser pro 2014 64, reality 3 and luxrenderer (tried versions 121 and 13 both open and non open CL 64.

Any help would be apreciated.

Thanks

Just guessing here, is Reality using the same camera as you are using in Poser? I've done this several times with DS and Reality2, but not with Poser and Reality3, so I could be wrong.

Hi DustRider, yes it is...

Hi Dante - glad it worked!

Thanks buddy...all the best my friend

Thanks to everyone who commented here. I took your advice and played around with Reality and came up with this http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2484019. After all the trial and error I was very pleased with the result.

hmmm... was working fine now when i open Poser i get "could not load Reality plugin" message. reinstallin everything including Poser did not fix. even a clean install of OS(was time to clean it out anyway) did not fix it. help?

Hindudreams - Wish I could help, but I haven't had any problems like that. I seem to remember reading about someone who had a similar problem on a Windows machine and it turned out they had the wrong version installed (32bit and 64bit mis-match). Hopefully someone with a bit more knowledge will pop in and give you a little guidance.

What OS and Poser version are you using?

im using Poser pro 2014 with SR 2.2 Win7 pro  x64. work fine at first then after a few openings and  closings of Poser  i now get that message

i figrued it out. i uninstall Poser pro 2014  and reinstall without the service release. it works. then i install the  SR one by one. and it only works with SR 1 . will not work with any above SR 1

it should work with later updates. You might want to check over a runtimedna in the reality forum. The creator is there and helps with a lot of problems.

Quote - it should work with later updates. You might want to check over a runtimedna in the reality forum. The creator is there and helps with a lot of problems.

i figured it out. i had to go to the pthon/addoms/reality folder and click on the reality.exe and manually set the Luxrender folder path again... working now

spoke to soon. after a couple of openings of Poser. its right back to error messe. i tried a muilple fixes from suggestions and  others but still error. im switching to Octane plug in. i'll just take this one as a loss money

Quote - it should work with later updates. You might want to check over a runtimedna in the reality forum. The creator is there and helps with a lot of problems.

 been to the forum. there is a thread ther with others having same problem. but never got an answer

after weeks, funny how it loads perfectly now every time. i didn't nothin different or change anything.... a mystery

spoke to soon. right back to that error. i quit