LuxRender v0.8RC2 release

[pciccone]

When it posts the error, it gives empty quotation marks after the word file, like this:
Unable to open image file ''
I don't know if that will make any difference, but I didn't include that in my first post.

Very likely you have unescaped backslashes in the file name. If you use Windows backslashes, convert them to forward slashes or double them to escape them.

[A-man]

Like the output directory file path? I'm not using any texture file or anything, just the built in procedurals. Or the .exe file path? And which one is the forward slash

[pciccone]

Like the output directory file path? I'm not using any texture file or anything, just the built in procedurals. Or the .exe file path? And which one is the forward slash

The error message from Lux indicates that there is an image file, I don't have your scene files so I wouldn't know but if Lux complains about an image file then there is a path somewhere, likely in the .lxm file, that points to an image. The forward slash is the usual character used for file separators in both Unix and with URLs: "/"
The backslash is the unfortunate path separator of Windows: "\"
The backslash is used in C/C++ to mark special characters like the "newline" by using a conventional notation, for example \n for newline and \t for tab. If you have a path inside a Lux scene that saya something like "C:\myfiles\mytexture.jpg" that string will be incorrect. It should be written "C:\\myfiles\\mytexture.jpg" or "C:/myfiles/mytexture.jpg"

[sadaj72]

Thank you!

It would be great if the releases could be distributed as installers as well, for the non-geeks Quite a few users get totally confused with the self-extracting archives.

i can make 'unofficial' installer in nsis. i can also include example scene and crf's

[Lord Crc]

Thank you!

It would be great if the releases could be distributed as installers as well, for the non-geeks Quite a few users get totally confused with the self-extracting archives.

i can make 'unofficial' installer in nsis. i can also include example scene and crf's

BinaryCoretex is working on a new offical installer which should be ready before 0.8 launch. In the meantime I could easily provide installers based on the old installer code, but then only LuxBlend for Blender 2.49.

[DoctorJellybean]

The previous RC was already one month old and we really wanted another boost for our server load, so here is the second RC towards v0.8 of LuxRender and it is mostly fixes and improvements all around (except GPU acceleration). We hope you'll like it even more than the first one and as usual we are awaiting your feedback to make a great final.

Does this mean that GPU acceleration will be left for v0.9?

[jeanphi]

Does this mean that GPU acceleration will be left for v0.9?

No, it just means that we've not spent time between those 2 RC, but we will try to take care of those issues before v0.8 final.

Jeanphi

[Dade]

Does this mean that GPU acceleration will be left for v0.9?

No, it just means that we've not spent time between those 2 RC, but we will try to take care of those issues before v0.8 final.

BTW, my point of view on Hybrid CPU/GPU Path Renderer: I consider it mostly a technical demo of Hybrid CPU/GPU rendering, from my point of view BiDir is always better (i.e. converge faster) than Path tracing so it isn't very useful to accelerate something that is "never" used. This is the main reason I'm not spending time on Hybrid CPU/GPU Path Renderer after the initial development.

Things will change when SPPM and/or BiDir will be accelerated by Hybrid CPU/GPU rendering; in this case Hybrid CPU/GPU will provide better performance than CPU-only renderer in all cases. I plan to add Hybrid CPU/GPU to LuxRender SPPM renderer soon after the release of v0.8.

I'm also planning to write a PathGPU Renderer for LuxRender based on SLG 100% OpenCL PathGPU tracer (or better based on the new PathGPU2 I'm working on). It will be a very particular beast with only 1% of LuxRender features supported (i.e. a kind of SLG with the LuxRender front end) but it will as fast as SLG is.

[strangeday]

Hi Dade, this is a great news, i agree about the great possibilities of SPPM(hoping that the use of stochastic hash grid or other advanced structure could balance the work between CPU and GPU) instead of Path tracing(due for its technical limitation and then for the difficult to make GPU "busy" without a smarter sampling strategy like Multiple-Try MLT), but i have a question about PathGPU2(that, IMHO adding to SLGPath, Sun&Sky and light support could became a good OctaneLikeRenderer-Killer!! ), do you think it's possible to add some advanced filter techniques, like the one in this discussion viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5687 (clearly added the two extra passes needed!)??(as always thank you and all the other dev for this great piece of software)

[postrock]

Its just a few days i know of Lux, but i'm already deeply in love with this project. Can't wait for future releases (and GPU acceleration )