Anyone using this plugin and if so how does it work for you.

Do you mean the new one, or Reality?

Witch one? Reality or the new Luxus?

I have the new one from DAZ, Luxus

There is a very active thread in the DAZ forums that the developer is taking part in.

I believe you have to have at least DS 4.5.1.56 for it to work

Works fine with Luxrender 1.2.  Haven't tried it in the 1.3 dev builds because only using SLG in that one anyway

The materials and lights are saved in the DS scene, so you have a better idea of what the Lux materials are doing rather than the black box approach that Reality uses.

I also have Reality 2.5 which has been extensively discussed in other threads

Quote - I have the new one from DAZ, Luxus

There is a very active thread in the DAZ forums that the developer is taking part in.

I believe you have to have at least DS 4.5.1.56 for it to work

Works fine with Luxrender 1.2.  Haven't tried it in the 1.3 dev builds because only using SLG in that one anyway

The materials and lights are saved in the DS scene, so you have a better idea of what the Lux materials are doing rather than the black box approach that Reality uses.

I also have Reality 2.5 which has been extensively discussed in other threads

 

Since you have both, perhaps you can give an unbias (or biased) opinion of which works better?, easier?  I also have Reality 2.5 but since this new Luxus seems to be more integrated with the render panel in D|S, it would appear to be easier to use.

Any idea on the animation capabilities (if any)?

-AniMajik

I've got both - so far I've had mixed results with Luxus but it's still early days and I'm assuming there will be updates to it down the road.

The quick summary as at the time of writing is that I'll be using Reality 2.5 for my "proper" renders, and I'll be using Luxus to create & save shader presets that will work in Luxrender.

Right now, Reality 2.5 is still head & shoulders above for consistantly high quality results, but I have been using it for a while now and can relate well to photographic/real life references.  I know that Luxus will be able to achieve the same results but it will require a lot of learning e.g. you can adjust a glass refraction to anything you want, but you'll need to know the index of refraction so you can enter the correct setting for each liquid/glass you want it to be.

I was disappointed that my Reality light sets didn't work via Luxus the way i hoped they would...  I assumed they would be fine once the scene sent to Luxrender, but were not recognised as mesh lights (had to convert to light like any other primitive, making them less efficient).  Maybe it's just that I don't know the right setting yet, but just commenting on my first impressions.

The big plus point for Luxus is that it will let you save shader presets, so you can set up a setting for Luxrender that would be easily reuseable on any prop/character and not be tied to the one you originally did it for (the same way you can apply shaders for 3Delight).  I haven't yet tried to render Luxus shader preset via Reality, but if that was to work, it would prove a valuable asset indeed.

Finally, I've never had any reliability issues rendering via the Reality plug-in.  When doing some test renders via Luxus today, I experienced several unexpected stops and crashes.  I've no idea if it's teething problems or a total coincidence, or whether it's because rendering via Luxus takes up more computer resources than the same scene will use via Reality - http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/18550/P30/#274169

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing - but as things currently stand, there really needs to be quite a few updates to Luxus if it's to be as intuitive as Reality.  That said, there are people on the DAZ forum that say they could never get their heads around the Reality layout, so one man's meat may well be another man's poison after all.

This is my second render using Luxus. I quickly threw together a scene and two area or mesh lights (maybe 30 mins total from setup to render... just loaded some stuff from smart content), The only materials I altered were the cornea and tears to glass, the belt buckle in the dress to metal and turned down the spec on the dress (though it needs a bit more).  But this about 3000 S/p, no postwork. (Thank goodness I have this new 6-core computer) 

The plugin did a pretty good conversion of the HSS skin settings, and normally that was biggest portion of my time when I did renders with Luxrender and Reality. And  that's probably the part that impressed me most, the fact I didn't have edit every setting.

But the plugin's conversion and the integration into DS saved me a lot of time since I would have to go back and forth between interface and surfaces with Reality... and some times the textures would stick and you would have to delete them and it back to the scene. Since the plugin is integrated, you just need to be familar with the surface tab and the render settings to set up the renderer and where to save your render. Also it's able to use spot rendering so you can just render a portion of your scene. Still takes a while for the luxrender engine to load all of your textures.  Also instancing is available and you can try out some of the new features (like the render optimization codes) without the plugin being updated by entering parameters in extra info fields.

I'm guessing since the settings are integrated into DS, any material changes can be saved as a .duf material file and distributed. Which makes it easy for a vendor or anyone else to create a material file for distribution or include in their products if they chose. Also if that works, you wouldn't have to redo those settings each time you want to use a particular object in a scene.

For a 1.0 product it's pretty solid for getting the renders, there's a few quirks that need to be fixed like tiled textures (though you can use mini code in those extra parameters to fix it until the official fix comes out, and you'll probably have to scour for some presets for things like water,  which I found), nothing show stopping... it's definitely worth looking into.