LuxRender is a new, open-source, free software rendering system for
physically correct, unbiased image synthesis.

http://www.luxrender2.org/

Rendering with LuxRender means simulating light according to physical
equations, this produces realistic photographic quality images.

It's an authorized fork of the PBRT project, focusing on production
rendering and artistic efficiency.

Please read our Features and Goals and philosophy pages for more
information.

Why another unbiased renderer ? Read our FAQs page for details.

LuxRender comprises an interactive GUI, a command line tool, and Blender
exporter plugins.
For developers, we also provide a C/C++ API allowing to embed LuxRender into
third-party applications.

LuxRender runs on GNU/Linux, MS-Windows(R) and MacOS X(R) platforms.

If you would like to show your support for our project, please register on
our forums and leave us a message.

HELP WANTED: Ask not what your renderer can do for you, but what you can do
for your renderer.

Post a reply to this message

delle <del### [at] ciaowebit> wrote:
> Rendering with LuxRender means simulating light according to physical
> equations, this produces realistic photographic quality images.

  Fancy words, but what do they actually mean?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> delle <del### [at] ciaowebit> wrote:
>> Rendering with LuxRender means simulating light according to physical
>> equations, this produces realistic photographic quality images.
> 
>   Fancy words, but what do they actually mean?

Clearly not what they say, since computing QED interactions is still 
horrifically complicated computationally.  I understand that even 
calculating the IOR of glass correctly is beyond what people can manage 
in a reasonable time with modern supercomputer clusters.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

Post a reply to this message

> delle <del### [at] ciaowebit> wrote:
>> Rendering with LuxRender means simulating light according to physical
>> equations, this produces realistic photographic quality images.
> 
>   Fancy words, but what do they actually mean?

It means that there will be plenty of interesting code availiable
from them once POV-Ray has gone Open Source (and vice-versa).

Fabien.

Post a reply to this message

471d0e43@news.povray.org...
> delle <del### [at] ciaowebit> wrote:
>> Rendering with LuxRender means simulating light according to physical
>> equations, this produces realistic photographic quality images.
>
>  Fancy words, but what do they actually mean?

Other unbiaised renderers have been available for a while now (Maxwell, 
Indigo, FryRender and the first two can be tested). I don't know how it 
works, but it's a definitely some fantastic CG technology. Slow like hell 
(like raytracing in the early 90s...), and still immature, but for 
architecture visualisation, it gives extremely impressive results if one can 
afford the bugs and the render times. For instance, Maxwell has a feature 
where one can change the lighting setup *** after *** rendering so that one 
can test various lighting situations in real time.
That's really something worth investigating for POV-Ray 4. IMHO this is 
much, much more important than SDL.

<rant>The lack of interest here is a little bit worrying: if we were back in 
1996 and Ryoychi Suzuki and Nathan Kopp were suddenly showing bizarre stuff 
called "isosurfaces" and "photon mapping", I guess that people would start 
snarking instead of showing some basic curiosity :( </rant>

G.

Post a reply to this message

Gilles Tran wrote:
>>> Rendering with LuxRender means simulating light according to physical
>>> equations, this produces realistic photographic quality images.
>>  Fancy words, but what do they actually mean?
> 
> Other unbiaised renderers have been available for a while now (Maxwell, 
> Indigo, FryRender and the first two can be tested). I don't know how it 
> works, but it's a definitely some fantastic CG technology. Slow like hell 
> (like raytracing in the early 90s...), and still immature, but for 
> architecture visualisation, it gives extremely impressive results if one can 
> afford the bugs and the render times. For instance, Maxwell has a feature 
> where one can change the lighting setup *** after *** rendering so that one 
> can test various lighting situations in real time.
> That's really something worth investigating for POV-Ray 4. IMHO this is 
> much, much more important than SDL.

I'm not so sure how important it really is in comparison to the 
SDL-Debate when speaking of POV-Ray. Although POV-Ray has always been 
more a raytracer than a modeller, it's charm is the SDL.

As for Maxwell's feature of changing the lighting setup: what is it 
really capable of? Even if it's just changing the light's colors and 
intensities, it definitely is a great feature... I'll have to look into 
that, I guess (I'm a sucker for the technical stuff).

> <rant>The lack of interest here is a little bit worrying: if we were back in 
> 1996 and Ryoychi Suzuki and Nathan Kopp were suddenly showing bizarre stuff 
> called "isosurfaces" and "photon mapping", I guess that people would start 
> snarking instead of showing some basic curiosity :( </rant>

I second that. Although the "advertisement"-approach seems a little a 
out of place in these newsgroups (it's more the "Hey buddies, look what 
I found/did"-Approach) and a double post definitely is part of the 
problem in that regard as well (SPAM jumps to mind), new stuff, 
especially when concerned with 3D, rendering, raytracing and all that, 
should raise some interest.

Regards,
Tim

-- 
aka "Tim Nikias"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

Post a reply to this message

message de news: 471dfcd7@news.povray.org...

> I'm not so sure how important it really is in comparison to the SDL-Debate 
> when speaking of POV-Ray. Although POV-Ray has always been more a 
> raytracer than a modeller, it's charm is the SDL.

The problem is that a lot of the SDL debate is grounded on the way things 
work in POV-Ray now, which is mid-1990 era CG technology. There's little 
discussion (but some misconceptions...) about the way things operate in 
other software, and why, and how they could be ported to a future POV-Ray. 
The SDL is important, but it's still a feature among many others. I mean, 
there are those new, exciting modelling and rendering technologies all over 
the place, many of them available as open source or in publicly available 
papers and still the discussions are mostly about the friggin syntax. The 
ability to write i++ instead of i=i+1 is not going to make better pictures. 
Improving the rendering engine will.

> I second that. Although the "advertisement"-approach seems a little a out 
> of place in these newsgroups (it's more the "Hey buddies, look what I 
> found/did"-Approach) and a double post definitely is part of the problem 
> in that regard as well (SPAM jumps to mind), new stuff, especially when 
> concerned with 3D, rendering, raytracing and all that, should raise some 
> interest.

This has happened a few times before, with folks posting about their project 
only to be dimissed rather off-handedly. This guy wasn't posting about 
V!agr4, but about an open source renderer so that people could at least take 
the time to have a look before snarking. I remember posting about Indigo 
some time ago, and the discussion ended up about evil it was to use XML as 
an input file format. That's kind of depressing.

G.

Post a reply to this message

"Gilles Tran" <gil### [at] agroparistechfr> wrote in message
news:471df388$1@news.povray.org...
>

> 471d0e43@news.povray.org...
> > delle <del### [at] ciaowebit> wrote:
> >> Rendering with LuxRender means simulating light according to physical
> >> equations, this produces realistic photographic quality images.
> >
> >  Fancy words, but what do they actually mean?
>
> Other unbiaised renderers have been available for a while now (Maxwell,
> Indigo, FryRender and the first two can be tested). I don't know how it
> works, but it's a definitely some fantastic CG technology. Slow like hell
> (like raytracing in the early 90s...), and still immature, but for
> architecture visualisation, it gives extremely impressive results if one
can
> afford the bugs and the render times. For instance, Maxwell has a feature
> where one can change the lighting setup *** after *** rendering so that
one
> can test various lighting situations in real time.
> That's really something worth investigating for POV-Ray 4. IMHO this is
> much, much more important than SDL.
>
> <rant>The lack of interest here is a little bit worrying: if we were back
in
> 1996 and Ryoychi Suzuki and Nathan Kopp were suddenly showing bizarre
stuff
> called "isosurfaces" and "photon mapping", I guess that people would start
> snarking instead of showing some basic curiosity :( </rant>
>
> G.
>
>
>

The fact that the luxrender2 is a "fork" of the rendered described in the
book Physically Based Rendering makes me confident that the POV-Ray
developers aren't being left in the dust. I've admitedly only read about 100
pages, but I've skimmed a lot of it just out of curiousity (without
retaining much). It seems to have some good stuff in it. Check out the
gallery of PBRT: http://www.pbrt.org/gallery.php for example, this one could
rock my socks off:

"render translucent objects with heterogeneous scattering properties"
http://www.pbrt.org/gallery/dragon_subsurf.png

Post a reply to this message

"Ross" <rli### [at] speakeasynet> wrote in message
news:471e205e@news.povray.org...

> The fact that the luxrender2 is a "fork" of the rendered described in the
> book Physically Based Rendering makes me confident that the POV-Ray
> developers aren't being left in the dust.

(my meaning being that I would assume some of them have read it or similar
works.)

Post a reply to this message

"Gilles Tran" <gil### [at] agroparistechfr> wrote

> The problem is that a lot of the SDL debate is grounded on the way things
> work in POV-Ray now, which is mid-1990 era CG technology. There's little
> discussion (but some misconceptions...) about the way things operate in
> other software, and why, and how they could be ported to a future POV-Ray.
> The SDL is important, but it's still a feature among many others. I mean,
> there are those new, exciting modelling and rendering technologies all
over
> the place, many of them available as open source or in publicly available
> papers and still the discussions are mostly about the friggin syntax. The
> ability to write i++ instead of i=i+1 is not going to make better
pictures.
> Improving the rendering engine will.

Right on the nail. SDL is great, but I hate to say it, is mostly academic
nowadays. Improving the engine, out of the box, no hassle farming, and
interface with popular modellers like Rhino which provide a plug-in SDK, is
what will make POV go forward.

Post a reply to this message