Latest News
New year, new build!
by on 2012-01-12 01:02
Check out the latest weekly build for improved GUI, more stability, improved SPPM support and the fix for a longstanding scattering bug.
LuxRender post-0.8 development status
by on 2011-11-28 13:29
After LuxRender 0.8 was released, this web site has been a bit quiet. So quiet in fact that some of you even thought we had stopped developing LuxRender.
Judging by the front page, it's not hard to see how one could reach such a conclusion. Fortunately it couldn't be further from the truth. That's why we've introduced this dev blog, so that us developers can keep you guys up to date on what we're working on. In addition it's a great place for us to explain new features in more detail.
So to kick it off, I thought I'd just give a very brief summary of what we've been up to since 0.8:
- Added multi-GPUs support to Hybrid Renderer.
- Added normal mapping support.
- Introduced motion transforms, specified using new motion block. Unifies motion blur handling for cameras and instances. Allows for motion along complex paths within a single frame.
- Much improved network handshake code, preventing slaves from ending up in eternal busy state.
- Added new "layered" material, for true layered materials.
- Added new "glossycoating" material, which takes a named material "basematerial" instead of the "Kd" color. Can easily be added to any material in LuxBlend25.
- New "fresnelcolor" and "fresnelname" fresnel textures, fresnelcolor allows to define the IOR from the normal incidence reflection color.
- New "metal2" material that takes a fresnel texture instead of a file or preset name.
- New "colordepth" texture to compute absorption properties from the resulting color at a given depth.
- Added support for adding files to the Render Queue via the command-line.
In addition to the above there has been a huge number of bug fixes, introduction of hybrid bidir renderer, and SPPM has received a lot of work.The above is just "core" development. In addition there has been a lot of fantastic work on the exporters thanks to a number of dedicated volunteers.
If you feel like playing around with some of the newer features, please download a "weekly" build. We try to keep the development builds as stable as possible, so there shouldn't be too many surprises. We love feedback so don't be shy posting.
LuxRender is being developed entirely by volunteers in their spare time. I think I can safely say that us developers enjoy working on LuxRender to make it a great experience for you to use, and that looking at the awesome renderes that you folks produce using "our" LuxRender greatly inspires us. So thank you for using LuxRender and keep adding those renders to our gallery.
Welcome to the new development blog
by on 2011-11-27 09:32
The idea behind this page is to publish information or previews of any new LuxRender developments.