Playing with Lux

Lux is Latin for 'light' and is also the preferred SI unit (International System of Units, or Système international d'unités in French, thus 'SI') of measuring luminescence, the less favoured being the lumen.


It's also a powerful hardware-driven rendering program, LuxRender, and something I've been mucking about with recently.  It's open source (and thus free) and has a number of extremely cool features.  But it's also very slow.  Have a look at these two pictures I rendered up today...

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On the left we have an extremely quick knock-up render of Ayalessa sitting in some scenery.  It was done in Daz Studio and was slightly under five minutes to render.  I loaded the figure, loaded the scenery, stuck in a Distant Light and turned the shadows to raymapped (which is the only reason it took five minutes to render).


On the right is the Lux render.  Reflections are stunning.  Simulated sunlight is breath-taking. Quality isn't as good as it might look as both pictures are resized to 50% of their original sizes but it's still freaking brilliant.  However, this picture - as basic as it is - is 160 S/px, samples per pixel.  The recommended is 200-300 as a starting point - and this took five hours to render to this stage.


In addition while the light is at 100% intensity in the Daz Studio image it's at 0.0000001 Gain in LuxRender.  it looks like the (mostly white) background has been taken as a light source and the whole scene's getting hyperactively illuminated all over the place.


There are some material issues (of course).  Her glasses are, oddly, dark.  The fingernails on her left (fore) hand are weirdly metallic; I presume the other nails would be but their positioning doesn't make it ideal to see.  Her butt, also, is somewhat more reflective than I'd have expected.


But look at those reflections!  Look at that light quality!  So damn good!  It just takes a disproportionately long time to render and I don't have all the quirks and settings worked out.


Verdict: probably excellent for high-cost commercial work and isolated artistic renders, but for the scale I'm doing things on (my lighting settings can get highly complex) and the nature of my work I don't think I'm going to be able to experiment too much with it purely due to the cost in time.