Some good points being raised here guys - I expect there are a lot of people out there who would want to take advantage of Lux's rendering power if they realised how easy it was now.

But at the same time, let's not forget that although Lux is pretty damn good, it's only good at one kind of rendering - photorealism, or something approaching it.

Art, of course, is more diverse than that and for many kinds of  image Firefly will be absolutely fine, perhaps even better. I know I'll still be using Firefly sometimes despite my current love affair with Lux.

By all means spread the word about Luxrender and Pose2Lux, but maybe not get too evangelical about it as it won't be the right choice for everyone!

Just my 2d worth :-)

Quote - Menu -> Scripts -> MaterialMods -> changeGamma

Use this script with caution. Some materials have the same image map plugged into both the Diffuse AND the Bump channels, and this script will turn affect both channels equally as the settings are applied to the image map.

Of course, materials shouldn't be made this way, but unfortunately some are.

Strangely enough I had cause to contact Netherworks for support just in the last couple of days and likewise received an immediate and very helpful response, so I'd like to endorse the comments above too.

Attached Link: Looking through walls

One method is explained by BagginsBill in the attached link.

Study great art, look at amazing photgraphs.

Try to see how the composition, lighting, colour and texture work to make a compelling image.

And bring what you've discovered into the Preview room. Make your own magic.

Couldn't work out how to extract the 'mud' from the VSS skin shader in order to make my own VSS shader, so just applied it as it came.

Anyway, now I just need to find a nice mudbath for him.

@Shedofjoy: Um  ... I'll stick to the mud, if that's ok :-)

@BB: That would be so cool if you could. Doesn't matter if it's not a VSS version either as I can do that bit myself, and besides I want to put some mud on elephants rather than a Vicky!

Run such software in a virtual machine. The VM can then be launched from any PC. With a sufficiently well resourced computer you'll not notice any difference in performance.

BB - Was your mud shader for VSS ever published?

I've just looked through the thread and couldn't see a link.

I'll double your Barking with Exter St. Davids 'en passant', leaving you vulnerable and with isolated signals.

Hm. There seems to be far too many religions and gods around, and far too many believing in them.

Lord Zanu the Omnificent will not be pleased.

Suspend them upside down in a vat of boiling yak turd, and then feed any remains into an Insect Horror Machine programmed by Death Demons.

I find it's easiest not ot even bother with the preview image. Just compose a scene then make a quick copy of it with Playdough (use lots of colours for best effect). Place a box with a pinhole near the Playdough models and shine a light on it. then you can just trace the scene that's now projected on the back of the box with a crayon (or felt tip if you can afford the Pro version).

*Quote - "Now common advice says that the diffuse component should be at most around .8. So what does that mean? It says that whatever spot you're looking at will be .8 times the luminance of the light.

But think about that. If you render this object from some viewpoint, you see roughly 80% of the light luminance coming from the object. 80% of the light is bouncing towards this camera position. Now move the camera and render again. Here, too, 80% of the light is bouncing towards this new camera position. How can this be? If 80% went to the old position and 80% is also going to the new position, then 160% of the light is going to these two positions collectively. That's impossible, right?

In fact, if you mounted a thousand cameras in a hemisphere around this object, you'd find that all of them are getting 80% of the light. What does that actually mean?"

*Light will be hitting the object from all directions. Only some rays (or some photons within a ray) will be reflected towards any one camera. Each camera is receiving 80% of the light that would have been reflected in its direction had the surface been 100% reflective. Your second camera is receiving 80% of the potential light too, but it will come from different light rays than those that are reaching the first camera.

You have the old 'if a tree falls in a forest when there's no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound' conundrum going on here. If you have no cameras at all, is there now 0% of the light going anywhere? And if you had 10 people in the forest, would that make the sound 10x as loud because the aggregate of the sound waves reaching everyone's ears would be 10x that reaching the ears of just one person?

"challenging contempory thought is the only place for art"

What an incredibly narrow view of the role of art.