Reality/Luxrender updates and/or status(?)

[Bobb]

If you've been following the graphics (and specifically Daz3D) news you'll be aware of the price jump (skyrocket!) of NVidia cars due to coin-mining. It shows no sign of stopping and folks are getting pissed. Because this directly impacts Iray rendering in Studio, there's a lot of talk in their forums about alternative renderers. This is what has brought me back to Reality which I abandoned several years ago. I'm not going to mortgage my house for an effing overpriced video card and I'm sick and tired of buying increasingly similar Iray shader packs.

What's going on with Reality/Luxrender? There's no news of any ongoing development with things seeming to have stalled a couple of years ago. I read that Luxrender has been abandoned but there's now a fork in the works.

There's someone in the Daz3D forums who's announced that he's started work on a Studio friendly GUI to use some new open source renderer.

...so what to throw my time into learning/relearning?

I'll stick with Reality if it's in active support and development but if not, there's still 3DL and this new thing.

[sigstan]

I'll leave the Reality part for Paolo to respond to, since I have no idea what his plans are.

Development on Luxrender has been very slow for a while, but not completely stalled. Next version was planned to be a major release 1.7, but this has not yet been released and meanwhile the entire Luxrender project seems to have been completely restructured.

The existing Luxrender website is not really being maintained anymore and apparently the core developers are moving to a new site and planning a reboot of Luxrender. See

Another interesting point is, that some of the core devs have hinted that Mac version will be discontinued due to lack of developers and missing OpenCl support.

Anyway, it is hard to say what the future holds for Luxrender, since we have yet to see what the "reboot" of Luxrender will offer. That said, the current version of Luxrender is still fine for rendering, although the OpenCL modes are a bit unstable due to recent GPU driver updates (primarily OpenCL 2 related).

[pciccone]

Hi.

I have been working on a plan for updates to Reality. At this time I can’t post anything yet, but I hope to have something that I will be able to share in the next few months.

Thank you again for your support.

[Greymom]

Paolo:
Great to hear!

[MaxAder]

Glad to hear!

[Gederix]

so the new sites up and the new lux is feature locked, so just bug fixes until release.

[Greymom]

First render with LuxCoreRender 2.0 beta:

Used last version of Reality (4.3.1) to export a complex Poser scene (walled garden with multiple plants, flowers, birds, etc.) as .LXS file. Closed Poser and Reality and opened LuxCoreRender 2.0 Beta, then opened .LXS file. So far I have been able to render the scene in CPU mode, and CPU in OpenCl mode. LuxCoreRender sees my graphics card (TitanX) but even if I select "Opencl GPU only", it still renders in CPU opencl mode. I could not figure out how to stop the render and save it. So far so good. I am impressed that it could read the older version files.

Now I see that the Beta 3 version is out.

[Greymom]

Beta 3 came out a few days ago, now the first Release Candidate is available. Hope to try it out with exported .lxs files soon.

[TransformerMan]

[thatguy3444]

@TransformerMan

I was hitting the same IES definition error in luxcorerender, so I looked at the code. There is a bug in the code that is reading old luxrender .lxs files - it is throwing an error in pretty much any scene that uses textures with emission (like reality meshlights).

I have submitted a patch for this bug to the luxcorerender project... hopefully it should be included in the next release!