Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven (Luxrender)
spearcarrier
Posts: 686
Yes, that is the name of a real book - and it also is a good title for how I feel about Luxrender. And Tonto is beating the holy crap out of me. No, wait. I'm Tonto. You see how confused I am??
I would like to like Luxrender, but it crashes on me when I do get it to go. Or, like this morning, I get a black render despite lights and me not changing any settings. Or, after I stop that to try again, it resets itself. And I'm just really hating on it.
The manual reads like this to someone like me "and then add one plus one blah blah blah the hypthesis of force fields surrounding worm holes has not been completely developed due to a lack in the black hole ratio pof spaghetti workings and many things we are taking for granted you completely understand. Cheese wine burgle." So, I get nowhere with that.
I found a really nice tutorial. Part 2 is here: http://www.digisprawl.com/blog/tutorial/luxus-and-luxrender-beginners-guide-for-daz-studio-pt-2-render-settings/ Don't really want to hunt up part 1 for this. What I like about it is that it gave suggestions for settings with plain explanations. Kind of like a walk through. "Now put a 5.. HERE." Which is how people like myself learn, being kinesthetic and all.
But it didn't help with all the settings. The overabundance of settings that I simply will never understand.
Luxrender, as I mentioned before, crashes on me. At one point I got it to wait a while before it crashed, at least, but it still crashed. And now I'm getting a blank screen.
I have 6 MP of memory on my old sticks. (I think.) I'm given to understand you need at least 4. At any rate I'm given to understand I have 2 more than the minimum required.
So can anyone just simply list me some suggested settings without the stereo instructions please? What I'm after: if Luxrender is overclocking my computer and that's why it's crashing, I have no way of knowing because of the settings issues. So I thought if I had some settings in it that someone who knows would use in this circumstance and it still crashed, then I could use our gas and food money to see about getting more RAM or whatever. (Yes, our finances are that tight.) But I can't take the risk until I know. And it's rather important I know.
I greatly appreciate anybody who can assist without confusing this aging lady.
Thank you.
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Comments
Well, Hmm.. First question would be do you have the proper version of Luxrender installed for your PC? If you have a GPU version installed and your PC does not support it that's one reason. If you have a 32bit version installed for the 64bit front end, Luxis/Reality that's another crash.
So If you give your PC specs and the Version of Luxrender you installed we can help get you going I think.
My heroes!
Okay, I'm running Windows 7 64 bit.
Daz 4.6, 64 bit. Luxus, and the Luxrender is: LuxRender 1.2.1 x64 OpenCL Setup.exe
I'm about to re-install it to make sure, but I'm positive that's what I grabbed the first time.
I tell it to run GPU so I can stop and continue later: my puter works a lot so it's my hope to leave things running while I sleep.
8 gig of RAM
Amd Phenom (tm) II X2 processor 3.10 Ghz
NVIDIA Geforce GT 430 video card
some bubblegum, tape, and a lemming.
And thats your issue you should be running the 64bit No OpenCL version for your PC. Your GPU does not Fully support it, heck my card which is a much higher nVidia version does not support it.
And You CAN load any Render Saved from Lux back into Lux later and start the render from that point. You do that From the Lux console.
Oh...! Sure wish I'd known that a couple of weeks ago. LOL.
I did manage to get the sucker to render through the night on the version I have and it didn't crash as usual... but... the render is full of choppy noise 10 hours later. And there are no signs at all of movement or change or anything. I even had 4 threads running after a while (the only part of the entire mess I understand). I've read there's a setting you have to be careful of or it will never render smooth, but once you have the render started it appears to be a setting you can't change. Not that I knew what setting that was from the getgo.
I'll switch out versions and see what happens in the meantime.
There really needs to be a luxrender for kinesthetic (read: dumb/not programmers) people out there! None of the "tutorials" are very tutorial except the one I found. =^-^=
In general terms, Luxrender only uses the GPU for very simple tasks while rendering. There isn't a hugely significant speed difference between hybrid mode and normal rendering due to the back and forth buffering between graphics memory and RAM. OpenCL is still very much a minefield in terms of getting it to work correctly with Lux, and there are several bugs which persist even in the latest version of the software. The most noteworthy of which is an error which prevents it calculating the correct number of lights in a scene.
I will agree that Lux can take some pretty head scratching twist and turns. It's certainly not for the faint of heart, as it's a very in depth render engine. Plugins like Reality and Luxus can help to ease the transition, but it's sadly no panacea.
Edit: By the way, I found part 1 of the tutorial you mentioned in your first post. It might prove useful since you implied you hadn't found it. Here's the link.
Not for the faint of heart?!?! This goes way beyond being brave or not being brave. It borders the realm of just plain waste of time. My experience so far has been 'Hrm, I need to know about the flux capacitor."
"Okay,t he flux capacitor has to do with grain conversion with the L-fibulator and the canvasing unit."
"Okay... what's a L-fibulator?"
"Oh, well, no one has put an answer about that out yet. But it has to do with this string of numbers that obviously EVERYONE knows about or they wouldn't want to use the thing: 221110010101010101010"
"No, really, what's a L-fibulator? Can I see some suggested settings for it? They don't have to match what I'm trying to do. I just really really need some meat and potatoes examples."
"K, see, we could give you some suggested settings for the L-fibulator to platform yourself from, but we're just going to talk at you instead."
"But now all that's happening is the room is getting hot and I'm going nowhere at all.... and I still don't understand the flux capacitor."
I think Professor X with the help of Beastman would have trouble with this. Warlock would probably turn the thing into bioorganic machinery in an attempt to get it to work, and I'm considering a nuclear bomb. There aren't any plain answers to go with to learn from so far. No wonder I"m finding thread after thread of people in my position getting fed up, cursing out the program, and moving on to other more expensive things.
I appreciate you finding me the first part of the tutorial btw! I actually had found it before and it was very nice, although I'll have to memorize it word for word for much of it to actually stick that way... I need to touch the problem not read the problem. What I had meant originally was that I didn't feel like linking it for the thread, being as it was only an example of part of my problem and didn't feel relevant. But that seemed like a lot to say at the time.
My render has been going stop and go for weeks. I'd run it and right before it would crash I'd stop it (every 20 minutes), save, and close. And last night I let it run for 9 + hours. It's a render whose settings were built from the tutorial, and that's the only reason why I could get it to go in the first place - I had an example to borrow from. But it has stopped at a certain very crappy quality and I don't know if it's the settings or what. It looks like it would be a decent render if it would just... render... I'll attach an image.
My method of learning is to get things running, go "ooh, okay so what's this?" and go a little bit at a time. I don't learn without being able to piece meal and actually DO. And this computer is also my living so not being able to do anything with "experiment" as my only option means I'll never ever be able to learn the thing otherwise. I need a platform. I seriously need a starting point.
If anyone could give me some actual suggested settings to start with, that would be most most most helpful. I could start learning from there.
I've changed up programs and I let the render go for an hour and a half with no crashes, so Jaderall your help was a big big big step! I can walk away without worrying so much. Thank you!
Except when I tell Luxrender to stop rendering my entire computer slows down stupidly. And when I tell Luxrender to shut down it won't, and I have to use ctrl + alt + delete to get control back. So I guess I'm facing the CPU/memory problem again there.
and the picture
Luxrender is an unbiased engine. It will carry on rendering and improving the quality forever, or until you tell it to stop. What this means is that you have to expect horrible images until it's had time to refine it. How quickly it can do this depends heavily on how much RAM you have and what CPU you're using, as well as how complex the scene is. Luxrender can be pretty memory heavy, so those with less RAM may want to remove anything not visible in their scenes to minimize how hard your PC needs to work.
So that I have an idea of where you're at, can you tell me what your current experience is with Luxrender? Are you using Luxus or Reality? Poser or Daz Studio? Take me through how you set up a scene and I'll offer what help I can so you can get the best out of your images.
Okay, so even though the render appears to be stuck at that appearance there may still be some hope? The reason why I think it's stuck is because when the render first starts out, you can see pixels move about here and there as things are put in. Currently there's no change. Not a tiny flash of color; nothing. When the puter is rendering the only thing I can do is watch, which I've been doing a lot of lately as I wait for something.
And I've read where other people put their render in as long as I have and got more results. But I've got this render set very large - at the time I didn't realize lux would render at 400 dpi as this one appears to be doing. I'm used to 3Delight's lower quality.
My current experience? This is my first render to even go. Ever. I've tried with others in the past and had crashes. And a scene I tried after this one would only render black space despite not changing settings - there were no answers to be found on why that either.
I'm using Luxus, Daz 4.6. I'm a little confused why people say you have to use Reality with Luxrender as a result, but I keep finding mention of that.
I'm not sure what you mean by how I set up the scene. It's a premade setting with some hills and a gazebo, water. I removed the hills not in the image and kept the gazebo and the water. Basically if I knew it wasn't going to cast a shadow for the image it got removed.
I'd open daz 4 to the scene but the settings have since changed, so I can't screen shoot them. I don't even remember them. So I all can say is I took that very handy tutorial and from the defaults Luxus starts with I changed to the settings he provided and hoped.
I'll at least screenshoot the scene itself and what settings are there now.
(Thank you by the way! BIG BIG thanks! I've been struggling with this for so long.)
Some setups.
The render settings are not what's being used for this render. These are the failed settings that would only produce a black image.
more
As you can see I've left most of everything on their defaults. I mean, sure I kind of know what's meant by gaussian - but is it gaussian as in a gaussian blur? Well, just in case I've left it alone and figured I'd learn about it later. Just getting the sucker to go at this point is my goal.
I'm going to hit "restore defaults", though, cuz I clearly did something wrong this last time.
Reality and Luxus are basically similar tools. They both convert to Luxrender format. I personally find Luxus the nicer of the two to work with because it gives me far more control, but it can be more daunting for newcomers like yourself, especially once you see the various settings you can play with.
A few points then. FIrstly, lighting works very differently in Luxrender, so you need to get out of the habit of lighting scenes as though you were working in the standard render engine. Light in Luxrender actually spreads, so by adding a lot of lights you're significantly slowing down render times because it has to work out the path of every single light in the scene and how they intermingle. Simple lighting solutions generally work better.
This is a scene I did recently. I used my own IBL preset which is basically just two lights -- one hemispherical light and one 'infinite' light. The hemispherical light is basically the 'skydome' and the infinite light is similar to a distant light in that it is always an infinite distance away from the scene. If you want to use similar light, you can download my presets by following the link in my signature.
Another key point is materials. Honestly, this part cannot be stressed enough. Luxrender materials and 3Delight materials are entirely different and as a result you need to think differently when working with them. Luxus will do its best to automatically convert materials into Luxrender format, but it is far from an exact science. Some materials will inevitably need changing, and this is where a working knowledge of Luxrender comes in handy.
Rather than repeat what I've already said, I'll link to a post I did recently which tells you how you can change what materials are used. It was a bit of an off-topic subject given the thread, but it has a picture demonstrating the different steps. I'll give a very brief rundown of what the some of the basic materials are.
Glossy: Any surface which has the slightest gloss should be made into a glossy material. This can cover almost any material, but in general you want to use this only on surfaces which don't have a more appropriate option.
Glossy Translucent: Much like glossy, except it also has translucency. This means light can pass through the surface and take on the colour of the surface. Think of a red sheet of plastic. Light goes in and comes out red. The surface itself has shine as well. Glossy translucent works well on hair too (as seen in my example below).
Metal2: Better than regular 'metal', this one has presets which can mimic the appearance of aluminium, gold and silver and others. Useful for all metallics.
Glass2: More complex than regular 'glass' but also more versatile. Not only will the material be shiny like glass, but it can also bend and separate light realistically and can even create rainbow effects like the sparkle of a diamond.
Null: A null material has no appearance and any surface which is pure null will literally not exist in the render. The engine simply ignores it and light passes through the space it occupies without being affected. Null can be useful if you want items for visual references only and don't want them appearing in the final piece. I use this effect on my IBL presets.
Cloth: Cloth is, well cloth. Used to simulate fabrics it has various presets including Denim, cotton, and silk. You simply tell it what colour you want the cloth to be, and how many threads you want the object to be comprised of and Lux does the rest.
I'm more than happy to answer any queries on specific topics or generalized ones. Before long you'll be a Luxrender master with the best of them.
Okay, so let me see if I'm getting this right.
Lighting: in the one render that would only render as black I had a simply distant light (my sun) and a spotlight. I can assume the distant light is the infinite light? But... the hemispheric light would be... turning the hemisphere into a light source? (I've read about this but haven't learned to do it yet.)
Materials: in the render I shared, I did not change any materials because, quite frankly, I liked them. And I was curious how the velvet shader would look. In a past failed experiment I did change the fingernail materials in the Lux settings because what I did get to see showed me that they were going through grey. Is there a way to get around this issue, and could this be the main reason why things are going so slow as to appear stopped? (Or is stopped. I'm still not sure.) The gold in this image is the Lux shader for gold, though, but the rest I hoped would render well because, as I said before, I liked them.
Opening your shared thread and going to print what you shared there - because having only done it once means I'm not sure about the process.
I notice from a quick glance at that thread that Lux really picks up on the specular light situation. I love playing with specular lights.. but I've noticed 3Delight reacts the same way as with that blue hair.
I didn't change the glossy/translucent gloss/etc though. Wish I'd thought of it. It seems to me that translucent gloss would be great for water. I've been fighting water a lot lately, trying to get okay with it.
So what I'm gathering here is that basically the shaders play a large part in how the picture renders just the same as with 3Delight. The main difference is that Lux treats light differently, which is why the result seem to be a bit more "realistic".
It's too late for me to go back and start over on this render: not willing to because it's come so far and I'm hoping it isn't dead yet.
So far as far as the settings go I understand about threads (that part's easy) and I think that pixel samples (underneath sampler) need to be more than 1? It looks like the default is 4 but I'm given to understand 8 or 12 is great? If you have it set too low you may never get an image that stops being grainy at all.
Specular lights do not exist in Luxrender. Every light added is considered raytraced and a full light, so trying to create specular only lighting is impossible. Lights work on a real world scenario. If you have a light in your scene, that light will bounce around and fill the area, regardless of what type of light it is or whether you've disabled shadows or not. Lights will not pass through walls as they can in 3Delight.
High specular reflection on surfaces will mean that light bounces around off them a lot. It can lead to washed out colouration as well as longer render times because light which keeps bouncing around a scene won't be destroyed, so your PC spends longer calculating the path until it finally dwindles enough to be removed from the scene. When it's doing this calculation for literally thousands of light rays, you can see how render times can be greatly extended by poor material choices.
Finally, just to clarify, a hemispherical light is a light which shines from an infinite direction from ALL sides. Think of a giant ball which encompasses the entire scene which casts its light inwards. This makes hemispherical lights ideal for things like Image Based Lighting (IBLs) as you can apply different maps and give it more realism with the light tinting depending on direction. It will also apply the hemispherical map to any reflections.
Oh - so if you wanted to do specular light, how would you do it? Or can you?
And how would I make a hemispherical light?
LUX only does real world type lighting, so the SPEC will need to be on the item/items as a material setting. To do any type of shape lighting you like in Lux you make a Mesh object the shape you want and turn the shape into a MESH light. The light from the mesh will come from the side the normals point. It's very easy to make Primitive Planes into those Diffuse fill lights that Photo Studios use.
Here's how to create a hemispherical light:
Start by creating a new Null (Create -> New Null)
Ensure the Null is selected.
In the Parameters tab click on the contextual menu (looks like four lines and an arrow pointing right)
Select Luxus - Luxrender Light.
Choose 'Infinite' in the drop down box.
You will now have a very simple all-over light. You can put textures and HDR's into the Environment map property to tint the colour of the light based on position. This will also apply itself to any reflective surfaces, so you can have a skydome without needing a physical presence. This has advantages because you can have full reflections yet still have a transparent background for overlaying on a photograph or other backgrounds.
If you download one of my IBL presets you can pull it apart to see how it operates. The Environment map child of the Luxus IBL parent is the infinite light used in this example, with a HDR map applied.
Thanks to both of you!
I let the render go for another 10 hours and the only change is pixels moved around a bit - unfortunately the other thing to only move around a bit was the black noisiness. It's not rendering any better. Image attached. It's flat stuck.
Now this problem I'm given to understand (when I research it) is a settings problem, because even with the lightings the way I have them and the materials I should be getting some sort of progress, not a lot of noise being rearranged slightly. This brings me back to my original problem. I really need to know what to put in those settings. Maybe if there's a chart out there. Bidirectional?? Pixels samples? It already had more than the default pixel samples called for because I wanted to avoid this, but did I even put the number in the right place? Metropolis? No, really, this is a real problem. So long as the renders won't render, then luxrender is completely useless as a render tool.
Herald, I actually think I've had your presets for a while now... but I have no idea how to apply them much less pick them apart. I have a lot of things in DAZ that are "I'm a shader!" or "I'm a Luxrender preset!" but when I try to apply them either in the shader tab or anywhere else they don't do anything except sit there and glare at me.
I guess at this stage I want to reopen the scene in DAZ and reset the lights for Luxrender, and change the water's shader settings. But I hesitate to tie up my computer if the technical stuff is still all wrong.
Started over! Set material settings to lux for everything by using the copy settings in the luxrender materials tab. Set one single light using the fine instructions I was given. Went to the tutorial and once again copied the settings from there for the technical (read: difficult) side except there was one setting he mentioned was good for outdoor; I used that instead. And set to render with 4 threads. (I'm scared to go to 5.)
So far so good. It *appears* to be rendering slightly faster, but it's still in the beginning stages of it's render. I was worried it was going to render as blackness but when it didn't I felt comforted.
I'm thinking for the technical stuff I'm going to start building a simple chart. I forget what's good for what, see, and I'm sure that's part of the problem for other folks like me who haven't had the benefit of the help you guys have given.
So it's going to be like:
Sampler:
Metropolis (complex lights)
some other one (simple lights)
etc.
So that you can go down and pick and choose according to the situation. And if that works I'll post it - unless someone has made one already. Either way, for a mind like mine it would be very very very helpful.
I'm not knocking the manual or any of that stuff because knowing the technicalities behind each part is helpful and important. But... also only confuses sometimes. :-) If this render works I'll feel confident enough to start digging at each part as I experiment, looking up the technical bits a little at a time.
And it's crashing. I went to 5 threads to hopefully that's all it was.
And I got this error, but I'm not sure why or how to fix it: [2013-07-28 08:32:33 Error: 2] Invalid number of buffers (expected=2, received=1)
The buffer error can occur if you try to resume from an invalid FLM file. An FLM is Luxrenders progress file which Luxus tells Luxrender to create as it renders. The idea being that you can pause a render and come back to it at a later date if you desire. It might be reading your old FLM file if the filenames are the same, in which case simply ignore the error because Luxrender will automatically create a new resume file anyway.
As for threads, I recommend going no higher than 4 for your system. Anything more would be a 'virtual' thread rather than a physical one and will not benefit your render.
If you really want the BEST you can get do this. Reset Lux to default and leave it alone. The Default is so much better than other Render engines it's not funny. Now as you get Good renders from Default. READ about Lux and only try the things that you understand. Thats my best advice.
Herald - oh I see. And I hear ya about the threads. I'm sitting on 4 and not moving.
Jade - I changed settings because with just the default my renders were only coming out black. Or not going anywhere. And that's how this journey began. I forget where, but someone else was having my trouble and someone (I think it was the luxrender forum) told them to change the pixel sampler and some other things. Of course no one suggested changing program versions, so it's my hope that this thread will help someone else. I've already told you what reading about lux has done for me. (Nothing.)
I've got a render going and it looks like it's going to make it thanks to you guys! The water is looking rather funky... but I'm not complaining. I'll paint in water or something over that area when it's done I guess and try water again with something else in the future.
Ah, I never even tried the OpenGL version as I was not sure my PC would talk to it. And I guess that made the difference for me. I did learn more from the old Reality Threads as I started with Lux when Reality first came out. Here is my work flow, I set up my scene and then the Reality Lighting. I then do the materials in Lux formats from the Reality front end. I do a SMALL render to see what I'm getting. If I'm happy I go larger for the Size. I've never twiddled much with the LUX console except for lighting. If I want extra things I try to Fake it with better Mesh lights. I'm not into Lux like I was in the past because the render times are just too long for the things I do. I'm into Comic and Animation stuff and 12 hour renders just will not do for that.
Yeah, I was actually wondering how I'd be able to get Luxrender quality with faster render times. I also do a comic and I'm content to use 3Delight for the one (someday) because I take renders and turn them into not-3d stuff... but the tantalizing thought of better art is, well, tantalizing. I looked at Octane, and it would be a possibility if money weren't so tight.
When I downloaded the version of Luxrender, I only knew "64 bit windows 7!" and my mental process said "open... sounds... like it takes less, what with the word open and all". Some technical jargon, in case you haven't noticed, just goes right over my head although I do try. ;-)
I didn't think a small render would render faster than a large one, so I was just going with the size I'd already planned. I think I'll back off and try a small render - that water looks real real funky and I'm wondering if maybe I wouldn't have been better off sticking with the 3Delight settings for it. I'd converted its material settings to Luxrender, and now it's this... plaid pattern. I kid you not. With the other way it was at least blue.
And I lost all my interesting shadows. I'm okay with that, but I sorta miss them. Just when I'm getting the hang of lighting things get changed on me again. Go figure.