Lux can do motion blur.

http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/Motion_Blur

Quote - I was going to argue that Poser metal is fine. But then I remembered I can't do anisotropic reflections yet in Firefly.

Example: brushed aluminum.

Laurie there's nothing wrong with your jewelry in Poser. So it's not fair to say it can't do metal and shiny things.

I don't think I said there was anything wrong with metal in Poser did I? ;). I just said I looks great in Luxrender. Mileage may vary...it's a personal opinion. Saying I like something better isn't knocking the thing I like less, is it? :P

FWIW I'm probably having more fun in the material room lately than I ever have to now. Infact, I don't think I've EVER had fun in the material room..lol. Maybe because some of it is finally starting to sink into my thick skull. Sure, I'll probably never completely get it, but I've been satisfied with my jewelry and the shaders for it more or less ;).

Laurie

Metal is pretty good in Poser, but after getting Vue and rendering some shiny :-) things with the Vue rendering engine, it looked even better then in Poser. So do caustics, but that's no surprise at all. I'm still impressed by the way Vue handles caustics, but I guess coming from Poser, it's not hard to impress me.

But metals and caustics sure look impressive with LuxRender as do some of the other effects. But who knows what the next version of Poser will bring?

A lot of the shortcomings of Poser rendering are a direct result of the way Firefly is built (hybrid REYES) so unless that changes, I wouldn't really hope for a huge improvement.

As for jewelry poser is missing dispersion and absorbtion which help to get the rich and deep look of gems, and the 'fire' in diamonds. Absorbtion also helps with things like colored glass and liquids etc

Quote - Lux can do motion blur.

 

http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/Motion_Blur

Whoops - thanks for the correction. I guess I stopped paying attention too long ago. In 2011 (last I looked at Lux) people were rendering multiple frames and merging them to get the look of motion blur.

http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=5815

So now Lux has motion transforms - I wonder if Reality includes this information in its export.

Quote - As for jewelry poser is missing dispersion and absorbtion which help to get the rich and deep look of gems, and the 'fire' in diamonds. Absorbtion also helps with things like colored glass and liquids etc

Having been a Luxrender user before I knew that this is what was missing in gems in Poser. I waited so long for glass that just didn't turn black (like it did for me in Poser 8) that I supposed it was a small sacrifice and I could accept it.... I really try not to expect too much from Poser, even tho I would like it all ;)

But anyway....don't wanna drift too far off topic :).

Laurie

My experiences: First off, although I've owned and used Poser, Carrara, Bryce, (even Animation Master) for years, I'm more a casual user than anything else [read: perpetual newbie] to rendering.

However, I have a specific look in mind and I won't give up until I get it. And I think I've almost found it... using Poser 9+Lux, using Reality.  I have a very high polygon face + hair setup.  At least in Poser, it looks very wrong no matter how I play with settings. And at 1280x1280, Poser 9 just stops/aborts rendering with a partial-hair frame and a subscattered face. Anything less size still looks bad for materials.  To be fair, I'm probably doing it wrong.

However, the same setup is unbelievably real in Lux. Sure, a 1280x1280 takes 5 hours to get to 200 samples per pixel (my base minimum), and 50 hours to get to 10k (wonderful). [Machine: i7(dual)-win8-16gb and a terrible graphics card (NVIDIA 640) plus one slave (i5)].

This has inspired me to go deeper. LuxRender's CURRENT GPU set up (1.2.1), I've found, is broken - causing bad white spotch looks (perhaps it's NVIDIA vs ATI on OpenCL). If you have a bad image, try turning off GPU [for now]. Version 1.3 (within a month or two) has much better GPU (and has daily to weekly pre-stable downloads to use now).

I tried a NVIDIA 660ti and, with the drivers bombing with Lux, read that (supposedly) NVIDIA cripples (or doesn't fix/doesn't improve) their drivers regarding OpenCL. All I know is, I installed everything (even the partially hidden OpenCL drivers available on NVIDIA's site) and their card still doesn't work / drivers bomb.

Soon, I'll be trying an ATI RADEON 7970. 

Bottom line is, I see the best reality in Lux and with Lux continually improving their engine, including GPU, I'd rather put my resources in hardware and have multiple rendering engines to choose from. Reality does an EXCELLENT job of bridging Poser to Lux.

Quote - I picked up Reality for Poser yesterday and tried rendering a saved Poser image using Lux. It DOES take much longer, and even when I've got the singular light I have in the scene turned down to something ridiculous like 5% intensity, I'm getting hot spots and the image looks way too bright.

So, it's clear that I have some learning to do insofar as managing light is concerned. I read in the documentation that I can adjust light "on the fly," but I've not noticed how that works yet.  More reading and experimentation is in order.

On the positive side, the Reality plug-in works seamlessly inside Poser, and I really LIKE that I can resume a render in Lux whenever it suits me. I may not use Lux for every render because it takes so long, but in instances where I really need the quality, this might be the way to go.

:)

There is more than one way to skin a cat here.  You don't have to turn the lights down to 5% intensity.  You can leave them as they are and fiddle with the exposure settings.

Quote - [quote  

Thats the first thing I tried. The mesh light created very even illumination, but what I wanted were deep shadows that derive from a single point light. I also wanted a warm color to the render, like that created by an incandescent bulb. At this point, I have to learn how lighting in Lux works before I can use the render engine properly.

 

Now I understand what you are trying to do and yes the mesh light does gove even lighting.  TYhe section on lights in the manual is very good and cover the differences in the way Luxrender uses lights to Firefly.  Certainly the there are differences and shadows is one aspect that appears to be very different.  Anyway I am off home to play and see if I can get my head around this. 

Lighting is something I'm always trying to get my head around better than what it is.  On the warm tones deal though; try fiddling with some of the film responses.  I've found that using Kodak Portra 160 NC produces very nice warm flesh tones.

You can also try the Reinhard / Non linear tonemapping and playing with the prescale, post scale and burn parameters which has a major effect on the tones.

those lux renders at rdna are fab IMVHO.  based on above discussions, one can feel confident that, in next few months, nobody need worry that anybody shall post an FF Render that could be confused with a lux render. 

Quote - those lux renders at rdna are fab IMVHO.  based on above discussions, one can feel confident that, in next few months, nobody need worry that anybody shall post an FF Render that could be confused with a lux render. 

I wouldn't say thats true entirely.. I've seen some very lackluster renders out of lux, just as I've seen some gawd awful poser renders.  I've even posted some (quite frankly not all that good renders) on DA and had comments asking if they were DAZ + reality.  

The tool is only part of it and LUX sint going to be miles ahead of firefly for every scene.  Though it may make higher quality results quite a bit more widely accessible.

To be honest, while a lot of the render are quite nice, I can say that I've actually been 'blown away' by many of the character renders(maybe a couple) I have looked at.  Even the environment ones seem like they are heavily reliant on the quality of their textures.