LuxRender vs Daz Studio standard built in render
Hello dear all,
since Luxus is in the banner now what is the advantage or disadvantage between the LuxRender in comparison to the DAZ Studio standard build in render?
If I install Luxus, do I still need to install the LuxRender to run it or does Luxus already include everything?
Thank you very much for the answers.
Greetings
P
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Luxrender is a very different beast to 3Delight (the 'built-in' render engine) and works on a more realistic approach to lighting. As a result, it's also a bit more difficult to master, as you need to consider lighting in a different way, as well as the fact that materials behave very differently in both engines.
Luxrender works using 'real world' materials which can be mixed together to form new ones. The basic materials are glossy, glossy translucent, cloth, matte, metals, mirrors and glass. Knowing how and when to use each one is part of the learning process, but very worthwhile if you intend to get the most out of it.
Luxus requires that you download the latest version of Luxrender available on their website.
Luxus can give very realistic results because of how light reacts, but there is a lot of work behind those results. For example, skin material is a particularly advanced topic in Luxus since you need a lot of different properties to get the best results, otherwise it can look very flat and lifeless compared to 3Delight.
It's hard to give straight comparisons because there is so much involved with getting good results out of both, but you could do a lot worse than to take the plunge and see for yourself. You can get fantastic results with Luxrender once you get over the initial struggles, so don't be afraid to ask questions if you ever get stuck.
As HeraldOfFire, Luxus is a DAZ plugin that helps you conveniently use LuxRender. You have to download and install LuxRender, which is open source and free.
LuxRender is a so called unbiased render engine. It tries to model how light interacts with objects in a scene. It uses Monto Carlo raytracing techniques to do this.
The build in 3Delight render engine is a biased, RenderMan compliant render engine. It also models how light interacts with objects in the scene, but it takes shortcuts to speed up the render. RenderMan is a standard for biased render engines that was developed by Pixar. Don't make the mistake of thinking because 3Delight came free with DAZ Studio, it is not that good. 3Delight is a commercial strength render engine that has been used for Hollywood movies and TV. You can find out more about 3Delight at http://www.3delight.com
Poser uses FireFly render, which is either RanderMan compliant or mostly compliant (there seems to be some disagreement). The way biased and unbiased render engines interact with materials is different. Most of the content in the DAZ store is setup to be rendered in a biased render engine. The Luxus plugin will try to automatically translate the material descriptions to the kind of descriptions LuxRender uses. It does a pretty good job of automatic translation, but it is not perfect. To get really good results, you need to learn how to tweak your material. Luxus allows you to add LuxRender properties to material in DAZ to make this process easier, but you still have to figure out how to setup the material.
How you do lighting is also very different between LuxRender and 3Delight, so you need to use Luxus lights in DAZ and learn different lighting techniques.
Finally, LuxRender is slow to render high quality images, but it will very quickly show you a noisy preview that is good enough to tell if you have completely screwed up the lighting or something like that.
Lux can give better-looking lighting if you master it, you have a good graphics card setup, and you can commit the render time. It just takes forever compared to 3delight, so it depends on how much machine time you can commit.
A minor correction: Luxrender isn't dependent on your graphics card. Currently, the hybrid mode and SmallLuxGPU are the only ways to utilize the graphics card when rendering. Hybrid mode still has some bugs which means certain types of render are currently impossible to run in this mode, and can sometimes take longer than pure CPU rendering because of the nature of how it sends information to and from the graphics cards.
Much like 3DL, Luxrender is more dependent on the raw power of your system CPU and memory than it is on graphics hardware.
A minor correction: Luxrender isn't dependent on your graphics card. Currently, the hybrid mode and SmallLuxGPU are the only ways to utilize the graphics card when rendering. Hybrid mode still has some bugs which means certain types of render are currently impossible to run in this mode, and can sometimes take longer than pure CPU rendering because of the nature of how it sends information to and from the graphics cards.
Much like 3DL, Luxrender is more dependent on the raw power of your system CPU and memory than it is on graphics hardware.
My bad, I thought Lux was like Reality in that respect.
Don't be scared off by render times. You can spot render, then render small to be sure everything ok, then interrupt and resume at will for full size.
I wouldn't recommend Lux on an underpowered computer, though. I run it on an i7 8gig without trouble. Keep your number of lights down, and everything works well.
Both Luxus and Reality use Luxrender, so they both have the same issue with graphics cards. Reality's 'Hardware Acceleration' is the same as Luxus' hybrid renderer. Reality also has an option to use SmallLuxGPU which renders very fast, but uses scaled down versions of the textures.