LARRUZ walks through seven LuxRender features: extensive material models including subsurface scattering and velvet, light groups for adjusting intensity without re-rendering, network rendering with offline merging, Metropolis Light Transport for complex lighting, film color profiles, GPU acceleration, and cross-platform support.
Dear fellow scholars, there is a really fantastic photorealistic renderer program out there that not many of you know about. So let me give you a quick rundown of my top seven Lux Render features. And note that this is not an official list or anything, just my personal favorite features. Lux Render is a completely free, open source, physically based renderer with many contributors, and it is led by Jean Philippe Grimaldi. What does a renderer do exactly? Well, there are many modeling programs where artists can sculpt objects, assign materials to them, and the renderer will run a light simulation process and show an image of how this object would look like in real life. You'll see in a second how cool these tools really are. So now that you know what Lux Render is, let's jump into the best features. Hold on to your pants, because this is gonna be good. Lux Render supports a multitude of material models. Matte glossy materials, glass objects of different roughness, translucent materials, subsurface scattering, metal scar paint, velvet. And you can mix all of these together to obtain an even more complex appearance. That's so great. Love it. With light groups, you can adjust the influence of light sources on your scene without needing to re render your image. That's the most interesting point. So you can, for instance, fiddle with the intensities of the sunlight, the light fixtures, and the TV in this scene. If you feel that any one of those are not useful for the artistic effect that you are trying to achieve, you can just turn them off instantly. And apart from intensities, you can also adjust the color temperature of these individual light sources. Such a gorgeous feature. I have played way too much with this. A great thing about Lux Render is that it supports network rendering. It means that you can use multiple machines that will work together if they are connected. However, what is even better is that this renderer offers you many unbiased algorithms, which means that you can do network rendering, but without using a network. Now, this sounds flat out impossible, but take a look at this noisy image. Not really convincing right? Now. Imagine that you have 10 computers running in parallel on the same scene. There's a tool called Lux Merger, which can combine together many noisy images of the same scene to get a better smoother output. So after merging together 10 images that have roughly the same amount of noise, we get this. Note that this is without using a network. So these computers have never heard of each other. We have run the renderer on them completely independently. Lux Render has sophisticated rendering algorithms like Metropolis Light Transport to render notoriously difficult scenes like this. Most renderers use path tracing or bidirectional path tracing, both of which struggle here. Here you can see the result of Metropolis Light transport running for the same amount of time. It indeed makes a world of a difference and this is the true final image. Different film brands and models have different color profiles, which means that they react to the same, for instance red light differently. Lux Render is able to get you this look which may bump up the realism of your rendered images as they will have the color profiles that people are used to see in real world photographs. It also supports GPU rendering. How much of a difference does it make? Here's a Test run after 60 seconds, one with the CPU and one on the GPU. I don't think I'm ever going back to CPU rendering. And finally, Lux Render is cross platform. It works on Windows, Linux and OS X as well, and it also works with a huge number of modeling Software out Blender, 3D Studio, Max, Maya, you name it. If you like these features, please come and be a member of the Lux Render community. There is a professional and quite welcoming bunch of people over at the Lux Render forums. If you have any questions or just want to show off your work, we'll be happy to have you there. We also have a nice scene repository with some truly spectacular scenes to get you started. There are also lots of goodies in the description box. Make sure to take a look. Hope you liked my quick rundown and I'll see you on the other side.
