Hello Carrara people.
I have been asked enough about a Luxus for Carrara, that it is time to answer. At this point I still cannot promise anything, but I have done some homework on this as I said I would.
Here are the major pieces to get this working well.
1) Geometry Pipeline. Or in other words, translation of geometry to LuxRender. This is done and was fairly straightforward.
2) Camera. This was fairly straightforward.
3) Global Render Settings. I see how to do it, it would be nice to have a better UI. Looks like McSketch is the way to make the UI better. This needs some work.
4) Auto Translation of built-in shaders. To do this well will take many hours.
5) Allowing users to setup custom LuxRender parameters/settings on materials and lights. I am still trying to work out how to best approach this.
What would be helpful to me is to know something about how people intend to use this.
1st) How important is "Auto Translation of builtin shaders". If most Carrara users would prefer to setup their LuxRender materials manually, then this would be less important. If most users see themselves just loading up their carrara scenes and hitting render, then auto translation is very important.
2nd) How important is it to you to build content that can be rendered with the Carrara renderer and the LuxRenderer? This comes into play when dealing with material settings. Ideally to me we would want a custom channel, like "displacement", and then custom LuxRender shader items that can plugin into that channel. You would also have the channels you are used to still there and working as expected. Or in other words, in one case Multi-Channel get another slot call LuxRender. In the other case, instead of the shader known now as Multi-Channel, you would change the Top-Shader to a "LuxRender" shader.
3rd) would people be OK with not doing LuxRender shader/material things in the Shader Room, but in some sort of custom dialog.
At this point it is totally manual setup and very much incomplete.
Try the following on a single object:
-> Change Top Shader to Lux Surface
-> Change Material(1st slot) to Lux Matte
-> Change Diffuse channel of Lux Matte to texture map
-> set a texture map as you normally would.
For glass do:
-> Change Top Shader to Lux Surface
-> Change Material to Lux Glass2
-> Change Interior to Lux Clear
-> On the Lux Clear -> Fresnel, change the Index of Refraction to Common Glass
Make sure you have a plane underneath or backdrop so you can see the glass
For area light, plug the area light into the Light slot of Lux Surface.
In Assemble room, choose Insert then Lux Infinite or Lux Sunsky to get one main background light, Infinite is like HDRI in Carrara, you need to type the full path to the HDRI map in the Map field.
In the Shader room, you first choose Lux Surface in the Top Shader, then Lux Materials in the Material field below, for example Lux Matte which supports textures. The object can be turned to a mesh light with the Area light material. Recommended to use 1-2 of these, together with the Sunsky/Infinite.
The Interior/Exterior are for more advanced effects, like SSS, something to explore later: http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxRender_Volumes
Render room:
Hybrid renderer uses GPU to assist, some speedup when using a fast GPU.
Surface integrator: Path is faster, but works only for exterior scenes.
In Luxrender: Change lights while rendering. Also you can save files for postprocessing later, like turning off a light.
Yikes! Sorry, spherical, that I didn't get a test in today. Looks like another late-nighter for me again. When finishing up a product, and find that you need to make changes across the board to all 43 presets... it kinda chews the time away! lol
I'll get on it, though ASAP and see if I can get some cool renders up for folks to see. At least test out the work you've done so far.
Peace, bro!
In Assemble room, choose Insert then Lux Infinite or Lux Sunsky to get one main background light, Infinite is like HDRI in Carrara, you need to type the full path to the HDRI map in the Map field.
In the Shader room, you first choose Lux Surface in the Top Shader, then Lux Materials in the Material field below, for example Lux Matte which supports textures. The object can be turned to a mesh light with the Area light material. Recommended to use 1-2 of these, together with the Sunsky/Infinite.
The Interior/Exterior are for more advanced effects, like SSS, something to explore later: http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxRender_Volumes
Render room:
Hybrid renderer uses GPU to assist, some speedup when using a fast GPU.
Surface integrator: Path is faster, but works only for exterior scenes.In Luxrender: Change lights while rendering. Also you can save files for postprocessing later, like turning off a light.
Thank you for this, 3drendero. Very useful stuff.
I have a little issue:
When I load a scene from the indoor presets and then I render, hangs both Carrara and Luxus. Other scene presets will work. Can test other this?
rk.
After an hour of beta testing, I found that the "Sofa2" object kills Luxus, delete it and Luxus exports fine.
Not skilled enough in Carrara to check if heavy mesh modifications will help, or if the shader is to blame, but it is a quickfix.
Hello All -- Hello Spheric Lab!
boy, Im away for a bit and I find this great news! yep, today I got back to the 3D Plane. I found another new renderer - no names - in full swing -- albeit with a lot of teething pains -- looks like the beta tester group wasnt big enough to find some bugs and problems. So not at all dissapointed I missed the first week of that!
And now this! This is even better news!.
Spheric Lab might remember I bought his other Luxus . Didnt get too far with it, - and I was waiting for SLG.
so make me happy Carrara! here I am!
Another Build for Win64
-> http://sphericlabs.com/carrara/Luxus.zip
This implements all the non deprecated materials from the 1.0 spec of LuxRender plus cloth(which is more recent)
- CarPaint
- Cloth
- Glass
- Glass2
- Glossy
- GlossyCoating
- GlossyTranslucent
- Layered
- Matte
- MatteTranslucent
- Metal2
- Mirror
- Mix
- Null
- RoughGlass
- Scatter
- Velvet
There are a few options that don't show on some of the materials, for example light cloth's thread count or metal2's fresnel file. Also, some paramters are setup to use Carrara percentage, but really need a much larger value. You can use Carrar's multiply, but a better solution will be addressed later. This build times out end of the month.
Sir,
This is excellent work indeed, and something that I had been hoping for.
A quick question.. Will your exporter be able to manage Carrara Generated Dynamic Hair at some point.???
keep up the great work, and you have a definate customer in me once this plugin is complete.
Peace,
S.K.
Will your exporter be able to manage Carrara Generated Dynamic Hair at some point.???
I could try to convert it to polygons, but I am not seeing any sort of access to the dymaic hair, so I don't think I can.
Ideally, LuxRender would add some curves based primitives/shaders.
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