Lux material editor idea?

[paco]

Just thinking out loud here but as a blender user I find it quite difficult to tweak materials/ scenes between blender and lux. Thats probably due to my lack of talent but others might be in the same boat.

It occurred to me that we could potentially strip the blender source so it only had a few basic file operations / geometry bits left. Then we could integrate it fully with lux and use it as a dedicated material / scene tweaker utility. Could implement some fast openGL previews of geometry and materials perhaps.

Might be easier than building something from the ground up, but just an idea

[A-man]

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=7432&start=20 Last post.
dougal2 Appears to be working on a node-based material editor with a preview. I don't think it has Windows support, but it's a step in the right direction

[paco]

Yeah, I saw that - and it does indeed look very good (c'mon dougal2!)

It would also be nice to move objects around, scale, etc as part of the final scene tweaking. Not sure dougal has that planned?

[dougal2]

Yeah, I saw that - and it does indeed look very good (c'mon dougal2!)

It would also be nice to move objects around, scale, etc as part of the final scene tweaking. Not sure dougal has that planned?

well, I certainly wasn't planning to make another 3d app for scene tweaking!

To be honest, the idea if using blender as a material editor would make this idea much more feasible, but we still need to wait until we can easily make our own material and texture nodes.

The standalone app I started would be a nice cross platform solution (yes, windows too, I wrote all the current code under windows), but just requires developer time to get it finished, and that's something I'm personally short of at the minute

[Sheltem]

Hi,

Using Blender source is an interesting idea, maybe jens could provide some feedback on how easily it would be to strip back blender...

S

[MaRo]

Hi,

you might already know, Jeroen Bakker has been working on a redesign of the compositor using OpenCL.
http://ocl.atmind.nl/doku.php?id=design:proposal:compositor-redesign

Some builds using it already hit graphicall.org.

Would this be useable as a start to provide a better integration of lux material editor based on nodes in Blender?

Just an idea...

[dougal2]

I'm not actually that keen on making the official lux material editor within blender - a lot of people who use other 3d apps simply won't touch it.
A better solution would be to either fully develop the standalone app that I started, or to eventually make the scene parameters editable in the main lux app during rendering.

[MaRo]

I'm not actually that keen on making the official lux material editor within blender - a lot of people who use other 3d apps simply won't touch it.
A better solution would be to either fully develop the standalone app that I started, or to eventually make the scene parameters editable in the main lux app during rendering.

Damn, you're absolutely right. Being a blender user I did not think of that . Luxrender must obviously remain modeler-agnostic.