Reality/Luxrender updates and/or status(?)

[sjanke]

"Anyone found a porting guide LuxRender -> LuxCoreRender anywhere?"

Not as such, but I managed to get a render from Reality to get through LuxCore. Here's what I did to make it work.

1. Have to use the OCL version of LuxCore. Using the non-OCL throws an error regarding the PATHOCL engine not being supported (even though the lxs file did not specify PATHOCL, but PATHCPU, as the rendering engine)

2. Had to do some surgery on the lxs file. I was getting an error regarding the number of values for "Kr" was incorrect. So for the offending lines reported in the LuxCore log, I removed the "Kr" parameter altogether in the lxs file. Seems like that file is for bump mapping, so it wouldn't be missed for a quick test like this one.

There's also an error report regarding IES profiles that are part of mesh lights causing an error in LuxCore. I saw that problem as well, but it seems to be fixed in this version:

luxcorerender-v2.1beta4-win64-opencl

Once I got the right version of LuxCore and manually removed the Kr parameters, the results were impressive. You can check the test render attached (the darker version is the luxrender output, the brighter version is the luxcore output). It's a V8 model, run through Reality with the G8/V8 material mapping that has been posted in this forum. Reality mesh lights from Callad package.

I especially liked how the eyes cleared up so nicely and quickly. In the luxrender version, the fireflies on the eyes would not go away on their own. The LuxCore result was also much brighter than the unadjusted luxrender version.

I might be tempted to use LuxCore more often if that tedious "Kr" error is taken care of.

[sigstan]

Yeah, I ran into the Kr problem too, and when using a more advanced scene even more incompatibilities. We are a long way from being able to convert the old scene format to the new at the moment. But then the goal should not be to convert an old deprecated scene definition language, but rather have Reality producing scenes with the new scene definition language.

BTW I'm not sure how you set up your comparison shots, but difference is still not that big between the two versions as shown, if we are talking cpu-accelerated rendering (which used an earlier Luxcorerender engine). The viewer is however different and in the old Luxrender viewer you would have to set the the tone mapping properties to get any kind of decent picture.

But the Luxcorerender project seems to be picking up speed and introducing some nice new features and much needed fixes.

[sjanke]

To be sure, I wasn't doing a very scientific comparison, just wanted to delve a bit beneath the hood and see if I could hack at the SDL enough to get LucCore to do something. And it did! Also interesting how it took my Nvidia card for a ride (I leave Luxrender in CPU mode). Lots of cool features in LuxCore and I'm looking forward to seeing it come to Reality one day.

[ix69pd11]

[TransformerMan]

[crickets]

[Marcel2586]

[ix69pd11]

[Marcel2586]

Still crickets sound