Quote -
Right, yes.

But we are in a stage where lots of people do a first try with their existing Poser scene. A Vickie, some props and 3 or more point-/spot-/infinite lights. If they don't get a result by pressing a button, they tend to reject Lux. Because for most people here a renderengine is fun, no science :))

It may be better to just set the default tonemapping to reinhard.

Quote - ok, i think my question was either misinterpreted or not fully understood.

right now, most people are not using IDL.  by far, more people are still using IBL alone to fake indirect lighting.  but LuxRenderer already computes indirect lighting.  so most IBL lights used with real indirect lighting might blow out the scene because they're designed to compensate for its absence.

for your basic outdoor scene in Poser, you might have an infinite for the sun and an IBL for the light from the ground, sky, and surrounding  props.  but in something that calculates actual indirect lighting, i'd only need IBL for what isn't actually there.  sure, if it's a closed box, the light light from the IBL won't get in.  and if something's right next to something else or really big, the only light will be the correct reflected light.  but if the spacing is greater, the space isn't enclosed, or the item is smaller, then what you're going to have is indirect light supplemented by IBL in an unrealistic way.

now maybe i'm wrong and this isn't an issue at all.  but renders being too bright were a problem with a lot of people's first attempts with IDL. 

not to mention, when IBL is used only to fake indirect light from surrounding items (which is true of a lot of studio style renders and indoor renders in general), it's just wasted information.

i wanted to know if anyone had any solutions or general advice about how to handle the lighting adjustment, especially considering you might want to retain the original lighting for Firefly. if there's not, that's cool.  it sounds like it hasn't really been considered yet.   but i wasn't wondering whether IBLs existed in Luxrender. it would actually be better for about 99% of my renders if they weren't brought over.

IBL does not contain 'bounce light information'. It is just another source of direct illumination so there is no conflict with IDL. In nearly every other renderers, they are used together.

Using IBL alone to light a scene get adopted into poserverse because IDL came late. If an IBL scene gets too bright when IDL is added, it is likely due to an incorrect setup such as high HDRI intensity to compensate for the lack of IDL.

As others have mentioned, if you want to retain the original lighting of Firefly, use Firefly.

Quote - i have a question.  a lot of current lighting setups use IBL to account for ambient light.  but LuxRender doesn't need the fake.  how does IBL get handled?  should we do anything with it before converting?

LuxRender supports IBL, so nothing needs to be done as long as the appropriate conversion is made.

Quote - > Quote - does gpu-lux need an exporter of its own?

Not at all. The file format is the same. Just a different implementation of the render engine.

You could probably try it already.

At home (I am not there at the moment) I have a graphics card I think will work. It has 112 processors in it. !!!

The current file format of luxgpu is different, geometry is in ply format, attributes are in a.b.c=xxx form etc, so it won't work.

It may be better to wait until LuxRender incorporates the gpu engine code.

Quote -
I think it is a bug introduced in 0.7. I've seen earlier renders looking directly at the sun and it is beautiful. There seems to be a hard black edge around any light source, whether it is a mesh or anything else.

Try changing the PixelFilter from mitchell/sinc to something else.

Quote - I want to add support for a pull-down menu to choose a realistic camera profile.

The lux documentation says:

Quote - LuxRender contains camera data for a small number of cameras; these can be chosen as a preset. It is also possible to supply your own camera model if you happen to have this information available as a .dat file.

Where are these? I don't see any in the LuxRender application folder.

Did they mean LuxBlend, not LuxRender?

http://src.luxrender.net/lux/file/f98eef13b6d6/cameras/realistic

You can grab them from the source repository. The LuxRender app does not include them probably because it is up to the exporters to make use of them.

Quote - > Quote -

Strictly alpha maps are not the same as transparency maps, alpha maps only modulate the overall transparency for all colors. A transparent map can modulate each RGB component.
Poser only use alpha maps.

My C4D materials have seperate settings for alpha and transparency. Other Modelers too.

But Lux seems to act like Poser: There is no alpha-channel we could use (I couldn't find something). So, indeed, your right. For Lux transparency == alpha.

LuxRender also separates between transparency and alpha.

Transparency is meant for materials like glass, driven by physical properties like reflection, transmission, IOR etc and not with a map.

Alpha is done in LuxRender using a mix material, where an alpha map can be applied to each layer.

Quote - Hi I guess I should have asked how did you get those  Poser stonemason prop textures to Export to LUX intact??
I can get basic C4D native textures to work but the poser figure/ prop texture maps
don't come over for me.

LuxC4D doesn't support polygon selections, so I bake the prop to C4D objects and split them by polygon selection.

Quote - How did you convert youe materials??
My brief experiments with LUXC4d last year
I saw no way of converting My Scene textures for Lux.
Just Curious

LuxC4D will do an automatic conversion of C4D materials on export, but there is no way of doing a conversion beforehand.

Quote - can you show a screenshot from you render settings?

It is the default export settings from LuxC4D.

PixelFilter "gaussian"<br></br>
 "float xwidth" [1.3]<br></br>
 "float ywidth" [1.3]<br></br><br></br>
Sampler "lowdiscrepancy"<br></br><br></br>
SurfaceIntegrator "path"<br></br>
 "integer maxdepth" [10]<br></br><br></br>
Accelerator "kdtree"<br></br><br></br>
LightSource "sunsky"<br></br>
 "float gain" [0.1]<br></br>
 "integer nsamples" [1]<br></br>
 "vector sundir" [0.71344256 -0.20329873
0.67057389]<br></br>
 "float turbidity" [2]<br></br>
 "float relsize" [1]<br></br>
AttributeEnd

Quote - This is a test using only a SunSky light, added it into the .lxs file by hand and deleted the other lights from the .lxo file. It's been rendering for 12 hours overnight and I'll leave it to render today while I'm at work.

The scene is Stonemason's Warehouse by the way.

The scene has a skydome that blocks out most of the light.

20min render exported using LuxC4D.

LuxRender works with blender 2.53, you just need the new version of luxblend from their source repository.

http://github.com/doughammond/exporterframework/archives/fcd2fd7cd7d046d63de50d90016e0a906ccc2e4f

copy ef folder to blender2.53scriptsio

http://src.luxrender.net/luxblend25/archive/76aaf3629dd6.zip

copy luxrender folder to blender2.53scriptsio

Gratz, a quad-core makes a huge difference in rendering. :)

Looks like an alpha layer issue.
Convert the materials before exporting, this will replace the Cinema4D materials with Indigo materials and allow you to edit them. Invert the alpha map in the Blend channel.

i7 860, 2.8ghz

i7 860 has turbo mode that runs at 3.33GHz when only 2 cores are active.**
**