Nice work. You can do the sparks in Lux too. Just add a plane, paste the texture on it and convert to light. Thats how I did the sun flares.

I'm not a marvel fan but I loved Avengers. Saw it 8 times lol

If you are using the latest lux, be aware that it may not save a FLM file. Developers are aware of the issue.

Workaround as per the ds forum

LuxRender 1.1 has a bug that prevents it from writing film files.  Even when File->Save & Exit is used, it only writes the tonemapped image, not the film file.  (File->Save FLM does work, however.)  This means you cannot restart a render, or recover in the case that Lux/your computer/etc crashes.

The workaround for this is to switch to the Queue tab in LuxRender and enable the ‘write FLM’ override checkbox.

Still please let us know as soon as a more stable version is out I love the new speed!

Quote - Nice work. You can do the sparks in Lux too. Just add a plane, paste the texture on it and convert to light. Thats how I did the sun flares.

I'm not a marvel fan but I loved Avengers. Saw it 8 times lol

Thanks Mousso. Saw it a few times in theatres and I'm workin' on wearing out our blu-ray copy. 

The larger sparks were scaled fireworks images on planes (freebie from rdna). Just the round ones were done in post. Didn't really need it, but what the heck. If you're gonna throw down the Hulk, might as well go all out.

I didn't use the Reality fog prop (duded up an old Studio 3 fog prop for the smoke), but for the uber slow speed of that one, I probably should have.

Oh well. Done for now! 

Quote - Workaround as per the ds forum

 

LuxRender 1.1 has a bug that prevents it from writing film files.  Even when File->Save & Exit is used, it only writes the tonemapped image, not the film file.  (File->Save FLM does work, however.)  This means you cannot restart a render, or recover in the case that Lux/your computer/etc crashes.

The workaround for this is to switch to the Queue tab in LuxRender and enable the ‘write FLM’ override checkbox.

Crap. Just dl'ed that tonight but haven't booted one from 1.1 yet. Guess I'll be on the lookout for the fix on the next round. 

I may have missed a previous discussion on this, but will we be seeing a Windows testing build of Luxrender with the "noise aware/refine brush" feature soon ("pmc_test" branch), I wonder? And will we be able to use this with Reality-generated lxs files when it comes out? As far as I can see there were builds for Linux and Mac OS prior to the release of 1.1, but not for Win.

For anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, it's a feature that enables you to define an area of the render (with a brush tool) so that it will be given priority for sampling (e.g. shadows and areas with reflection noise). I don't think I need to explain how awesome a feature this will be.

See here, and note the linked forum discussions which tell you a lot more about it.

Anyone have the link to John's freebie site?  For some odd reason I can't find the lights or candles anywhere. 

Here's the latest render.. fresh out of the oven.

Quote - Anyone have the link to John's freebie site?  For some odd reason I can't find the lights or candles anywhere. 

Here's the latest render.. fresh out of the oven.

I can see that your having fun with the new box.....  The candles are not packaged yet, should be any day/minute now.

KH.. yeah. having fun while I have it.. have it listed on ebay for $1k.. as soon(if) it sells.. i'l rebuy all the parts and build another one.. by then the new piledrivers should be out...  i was having SOME difficulties with renders stopping because I had not set the computer to not go into standby when inactive.. went to bed on a render that should have had 2k passes in the morning only to see it only have 250.  corrected THAT problem right away...  now i don't have to babysit my renders

Quote - Just my two pennies. Paolo's the man to suggest a better solution. ;-) 

There is nothing special about the Reality water plane except that I took the necessary steps to make it work. If you look at the geometry of many environments, the single surfaces are very low-poly. For example, if the scene has a rectangular swimming pool, the water plane there might be even a single polygon. In many cases it's a matter of single-digit resolution. You cannot displace something that has such low resolution, no matter how much you subdivide it.

The Reality water plane has fine geometry which gets even finer by the default two levels of subdivisions applied by Reality. That allows the surface to be displaced nicely by the ripples effect. You can add any piece of geometry to Studio for water effects. Just make sure that:

• It has fine geometry that can be displaced (look at the Reality water plane for help)

• The normals are oriented correctly. Where the normals point to is consider "exterior," the other side is the interior of the water volume.

Follow those two single steps and you can model any shape. Remember that you can create any primitive in Studio with subdivisions. Look at the window that pops up when you create a cube, a plane etc. A well subdivided cube with D-formers applied can work pretty well. Otherwise Blender/ZBrush/modo are your friends :)

Hope this helps.

Attached Link: Luxrender

 Otherwise Blender/ZBrush/modo are your friends :)

Hope this helps.

You forgot PS LOL

I know you are prolly referring more to modelling softaware but I just could not help myself...

I've had my mad scientist rendering now for over 36 hours and it still hasn't cleared.  It has fireflies or whatever the noise looking spots are called.  How long does it normally take for something with alot of glass to clear?  Is there something else I should do?  Will it ever clear?

Many thanks to Kim, Jim & Michael for testing this set for us.

Click on the banner below :)

Thank you VERY much for the candles!  I rushed off to get them and already have ideas for their use.

Quote - I've had my mad scientist rendering now for over 36 hours and it still hasn't cleared.  It has fireflies or whatever the noise looking spots are called.  How long does it normally take for something with alot of glass to clear?  Is there something else I should do?  Will it ever clear?

Hiya Xandi! Glass is, in my thoughts only, one of the three bogeys to speed in Lux. That, fog and water consume a lot of the processing time towards a nice, clear image. What light you use and how you disperse it through a scene has a lot to do with both raw quality and noise production, especially in a scene with lots of glass and metals/reflective surfaces. 

While in most cases 36 hours sounds like overkill with the newer versions of Lux (also depending on your computer's capabilities) I would suggest you look at your light setup if the samples have surpassed 900 and still looks grainy. If you're image is throwing tons and tons of fireflies, material considerations might also be up for review. 

Have you a current picture for visual comparison? 

Quote - Just finished uploading the candle set, hope you find the set useful.

Many thanks to Kim, Jim & Michael for testing this set for us.

Click on the banner below :)

Thanks John!

You have 2 not found images on your site (book and candle) :)

Thanks for the candles

I went through an old 500G external drive yesterday and found some old scenes I had backed up.

Boom, Paolo, Micheal & possibly Reggie & James were around and may remember this scene driving me ape sh*t because renders would take me 3 days with this room.

Well this is after 10 MINUTES! with lux 1.1 (I would render it to term but have commish projects I need to render before I go out of town on Sunday)  Needless to say I am gald my perseverance & the help of you great folks has paid off. So many thanks!

I'm only at 611.64kc, so I guess I'll wait til it gets to 900.  It's clearing a little bit gradually.

Quote - Oh the difference 7 1/2 months, 600 plus renders, several newer versions of lux & getting better at adjusting materials & lighting can make.

I went through an old 500G external drive yesterday and found some old scenes I had backed up.

Boom, Paolo, Micheal & possibly Reggie & James were around and may remember this scene driving me ape sh*t because renders would take me 3 days with this room.

Well this is after 10 MINUTES! with lux 1.1 (I would render it to term but have commish projects I need to render before I go out of town on Sunday)  Needless to say I am gald my perseverance & the help of you great folks has paid off. So many thanks!

I remember that one, too.

Attached Link: Giant a comin'

If you notice in my re render of the old scene the colors are much richer due to darkening the color specular settings where they were more grayish.. In addition using a mesh with sun pre set and a curve light rather then the default sunlight cuts down on time drastically.

Quote - Well this is after 10 MINUTES! with lux 1.1 (I would render it to term but have commish projects I need to render before I go out of town on Sunday)  Needless to say I am gald my perseverance & the help of you great folks has paid off. So many thanks!

The technology surely improved but what made the big difference is your experience. I see this happening all the time and you might remember that we probably said something along those lines :) Practice makes perfect and you had a lot of practice which is helping you now acheive your results in excelkent time. You did it. Congratulations and thank you for "sticking around" :)

Quote - > Quote - Well this is after 10 MINUTES! with lux 1.1 (I would render it to term but have commish projects I need to render before I go out of town on Sunday)  Needless to say I am gald my perseverance & the help of you great folks has paid off. So many thanks!

The technology surely improved but what made the big difference is your experience. I see this happening all the time and you might remember that we probably said something along those lines :) Practice makes perfect and you had a lot of practice which is helping you now acheive your results in excelkent time. You did it. Congratulations and thank you for "sticking around" :)

No thank you for putting out a fantastic product for such a reasonable price!! (Even though clients have bought me this tee hee:) I am pumped and so looking forward to 3. If it were not for Reality 3 coming I would go back to DS4.0 I find the problems with 4.5 outweigh the benefits... I do have to get around to maps at some point all in good time...

Attached Link: spill

This is the one that only took 10 minutes!! Using of of John's spotlights and both have a sky of reality night ibl & PS is still very much my friend LOL

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - Well this is after 10 MINUTES! with lux 1.1 (I would render it to term but have commish projects I need to render before I go out of town on Sunday)  Needless to say I am gald my perseverance & the help of you great folks has paid off. So many thanks!

The technology surely improved but what made the big difference is your experience. I see this happening all the time and you might remember that we probably said something along those lines :) Practice makes perfect and you had a lot of practice which is helping you now acheive your results in excelkent time. You did it. Congratulations and thank you for "sticking around" :)

No thank you for putting out a fantastic product for such a reasonable price!! (Even though clients have bought me this tee hee:) I am pumped and so looking forward to 3. If it were not for Reality 3 coming I would go back to DS4.0 I find the problems with 4.5 outweigh the benefits... I do have to get around to maps at some point all in good time...

You have come a long way, grass-hoppa', but the path ahead is longer still. ;-) 

You know, I almost caved today and installed 4.5 when I was cleaning out and transfering content download files for storage. Then I went looking for my Reality serial and decided, "nah!" Still not crazy about losing reverse compatability again, like what happened when going from 3A to 4.  

You have come a long way, grass-hoppa', but the path ahead is longer still. ;-)

No doubt my friend...no doubt.... As far as getting into maps just like using Reality / Lux its not a need for the format I produce its a gulity pleasure but then I look at the stuff Mikey is pumping out and I want to be able to do that at some point..

Whats pissing me off is the pair of bootsin from shoe pack 2 which was used for my main character no longer converts with auto fit.... What is the point of having faster load times if one is stalled with a billion duplication errors? I am not re installing weeks worth of content so that MAYBE they will no longer happen, and since I dont add the unistallers I would have to do it all manually...

Anyone know if it's possible to render a Vue scene via the studio/reality/lux workflow?  apparently, you can get download the full version of Vue from E-on.  If you don't register it and render your scene IN Vue, it puts a watermark on all your surfaces.  If you use an external renderer it doesn't do this.  

Attached Link: Oh no

Quote - > Quote - Oh the difference 7 1/2 months, 600 plus renders, several newer versions of lux & getting better at adjusting materials & lighting can make.

I went through an old 500G external drive yesterday and found some old scenes I had backed up.

Boom, Paolo, Micheal & possibly Reggie & James were around and may remember this scene driving me ape sh*t because renders would take me 3 days with this room.

Well this is after 10 MINUTES! with lux 1.1 (I would render it to term but have commish projects I need to render before I go out of town on Sunday)  Needless to say I am gald my perseverance & the help of you great folks has paid off. So many thanks!

Ditto

 

I remember that one, too.

The times are just off the charts with 1.1 im on my 5th commish render in 7 hours... Nothing I can post here LOL...

Like I said James I remember you being around...

Latest render fresh out of the oven.  Only post work was a bit of color correction and adding a diffuse filter to cover up some shadows that were still grainy after 3k passes.

Nice one man

Thanks Bob.. just trying to get my scenes a bit more complex than my standard model/backdrop routine.  Not sure if I'll have any to post tomorrow as I promised the wife I'd use the big computer to finish rendering some of her stuff that she got impatient on.

Quote - Anyone know if it's possible to render a Vue scene via the studio/reality/lux workflow?  apparently, you can get download the full version of Vue from E-on.  If you don't register it and render your scene IN Vue, it puts a watermark on all your surfaces.  If you use an external renderer it doesn't do this.  

If you can export the whole lot as an obj, sure. I've got a few versions of Vue, none of which came with the exporter module (available seperately for 150 bones or in the uber-expensive Complete and xStream packages).

Keep in mind though that Studio won't be able to make adjustments like you could in a Studio scene. I'm not even sure how the materials are handled. There is a fellow on dA named Giovianio that exports from Vue into Studio and uses Lux to render.

It would be something nice to have, as Cornucopia (Vue's content site) has some exceptionally nice models. 

I thought the 600 was the number of passes, but since it's declining, I must have misunderstood. So, here's a screen capture of it.

Quote -
I thought the 600 was the number of passes, but since it's declining, I must have misunderstood. So, here's a screen capture of it.

Good news or bad news first?

I always prefer bad first, so here's my take: that bugger won't be getting any better. Ever. 

Good news: You've attained the highest sample rate I've ever seen!!!! If I see that correct (bit small for my eyes), it looks like you've carbonfluxed your image, twice over! (Carbonfluxing I've read on Lux's site as attaining 10,000 samples per pixel, something I've only done once! The word sounds cool so I keep using it)

Quote - Just finished uploading the candle set, hope you find the set useful.

Many thanks to Kim, Jim & Michael for testing this set for us.

Click on the banner below :)

Thanks John!

You have 2 not found images on your site (book and candle) :)

You've got me worried there Doc, I've had a look on my PC and my wife's laptop and everything looks fine, have you tried refreshing the page and pressing the home button ? It may be something to do with the Web-Builder. Is anyone else having problems with it ?

SBT.. yes.. xandi has now attained her own adjective.. she has Megafluxed her render.  I don't think I've ever seen 22k passes.  most i've every personally done is 5500 on a slg render.

I don't think those are fireflies that are not clearing up.. i think it's been rendered so long that lux is now picking out and highlighting individual molecules.

with the whole vue into studio thing.. i'm not sure i WANT studio to be able to make adjustments to a vue mesh.. from what i can tell from the interface.. i'd have to export it as a 3ds file.. open in 3ds and save as an obj.. then import the obj into studio.  right now it's more for the "let's see if i can do THIS" factor more than anything.  I want to take one of those beautiful Vue scenes and see what kind of magic that lux can do with it

So, obviously I need to redo my render.  Suggestions?  What should I do so I don't get all those bright thingies.  Fireflies? I guess I'll have to check my render more often.  I check it quite a bit.  I went through again and checked glossy. None of the values are at max. Most all my glass is just plain glass, no boxes checked.  The IOR I used was the crown preset.  Thin Film of 1.07.  I've never had this happen before.  But I've never used this much glass either. 

Seems the updated LuxRender has a problem with rendering IBLs: skies are b&w instead of colours (unless the IBL Gain is cranked up).

It rendered fine for me

Yes, my mistake.

Quote - Yes, my mistake.

No worries was just trying to help back one of the rare moments where I can. Im too busy with commish projects to partake in the contest... Looks like I am going to build that box next summer & if all goes well perhaps upgrade my TV too. I usually would buy content but m refusing to spend another cent in the DS store until they fix their garbage of a program. This is far worse then what 3 was at the time. I dont blame Paolo for distancing himself from them.

Quote - I don't think those are fireflies that are not clearing up.. i think it's been rendered so long that lux is now picking out and highlighting individual molecules.

I can't even think of a good comeback that was so funny!

As I was curious, I dl'ed the Vue PLE edition to check it out. Still downloading that massive file, but from what the site says, exporting is supported. Hmm!! It also says that Maya and its ilk are supported for export, so I wonder if the FBX format is available (??). Seems Studio 4.5 has made available the import of FBX, which is rather nice as I have a buldging folder of said content but nothing to do with it. Dare I greenlight 4.5?

If you've already got 'er installed, see what happens with a pack-in prop from Vue and what formats are there, if you'd be so kind! If nothing else, Vue makes great terrains and ocean/waterscapes. If it were faster to render and stable (in Vue), I would have used it more often. 

Quote - So, obviously I need to redo my render.  Suggestions?  What should I do so I don't get all those bright thingies.  

My humble suggestion would be to check your specular settings on anything you set to Glossy. Anything over 84 is pretty extreme. I try to hover at 50 or way below. That should help curtail firefly production.

Also your light setup is key with this much Glass (and metal if you set a high polish. 9000-9500 is good for the 'new' look, or 5500-7000 for slightly used. 1500-2000 for well used. Just my personal observations. Experimenting helps you learn!)

Back to lights, depending on what kind of shadows you want thrown, one mesh light inside the cube and scaled to your desire is plenty, or a good starting point. You can always up the power/gain to offset for size for that size scene. Also for the cube itself, you can always set it mildly opaque or even matte translucent and set a textured plane behind anything in the camera view and place light(s) outside the cube. Just remember that each light source in the scene quantifies complexity, i.e. render calculations. Maximizingwhat you can with fewer lights means faster rendering (general rule of thumb). 

DAZ has updated Studio to 4.5.1.6

Looks like plugins work, some have reported the usual install/uninstall issues that they had last time.

If you didn't have issues last time, could be worth it.

@xandi

some great advice from SuperBoom... if its any consolation, here is an example of my first render with the scene in comparison to have played for the last two weeks...! `¬)

The biggest thing was to go round reducing the specular and the glossyness strength. The table top was pretty bad... The top render below just ended up as a total white out - the perfect example of materials out of control!

The lower render is has had a bit further work done to it, but is about where I was a couple of days ago...