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.
Mac64 Build
-> http://sphericlabs.com/carrara/Mac64/Luxus.zip
I have changed when it asks for the LuxRender folder to when Luxus is first chosen as the Renderer. Mac 10.8 did not like the old way(crashed Carrara).
Those using Mac's should run the LuxRender app at least once via Finder before attempting to render. You will almost for sure need to right click -> open to "enable" it through security. OSX will warn you about running application downloaded from the internet., say ok and you should be good.
Wanted to compare Lux against Carrara's HDRI... My first Luxus render so I have ZERO experience with Lux's shaders....
CARRARA'S GI (default settings - not optimized, glow shader is the light source)
LuxRender (Lux Area Light shader is the light source)
Another WIn64 Build
-> http://sphericlabs.com/carrara/Win64/Luxus.zip
Changes:
Fixed crash on any object or shading domain that was not assigned a shader.
Holly its simple amazing how a simple light source can make so better render in LuxRender! Its a good example of what we can have when everythoing is done!
Hi,
pitty I don;t have time to play with this amazing plug-in as much as I would like, but I noticed in the latest "Luxus the Luxrender plugin for Carrara – Development/documentation blog 20130426" a question to support Carrara hair, well if that would be possible, it would be more than wonderful if the plug-in would support hair and other volumetric objects from Carrara and would do one tiny thing, inlcude them in DOF that would be so awesome!
For me personally one of the biggest downside of Carrara's internal rendering engine is that it ignores volumetric objects in DOF and as I suspect Luxus should work beautifully with volumetric shaders and DOF, this would add so much to the image quality.
thank you so much for this development that is mad fast and brings art creation in Carrara to the next dimension!
New builds
Win64 -> http://sphericlabs.com/carrara/Win64/Luxus.zip
Mac64 -> http://sphericlabs.com/carrara/Mac64/Luxus.zip
Changes:
-> Improve Autotranslation. V4 and M4 look halfway decent now.
-> The cone angle and angular falloff now work on spot light
-> Build times out end of May.
Something happend with the latest (15) Mac build. Screencapture attached.
Can't create Luxrender lights.
File attach did not function. The pop up says
"File: /User/build/SAZDevel/Build/Carrara85/InstallerScripts/common/ ../ ../src/Kwak/Shell/app/3DDBActions.cpp
Line: 274
A nil pointer error occurred while executing Insert Object"
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