Blender future...

[paco]

I think Lux has one major identifiable disadvantage for those that are not already familiar with the Blender. That is, there's a very long 'spin-up' and learning curve that one must go through to really embrace the power of Lux. It's not that Lux is too complex, or more complex than other render engines in the same space, but it's actually a little more difficult to fully get working. Have a Lux Studio app will make it so much easier for newbies to use Lux.

Great point!

I must admit that the constantly changing blender API has made it difficult to keep using lux/blender. If I step away for a few weeks/months then in order to get the latest lux features I also need to try and find a compatible combination of blender/luxblend/lux which can be a bit challenging - especially for new users.

Blender is a great free tool and if the API had been stable then I don't think we'd be at this point. But hey, they've got their goals as has been pointed out and I don't think the lux community bears them ill will, its just a question of incompatibility.

[rendermagic]

Great point!

I must admit that the constantly changing blender API has made it difficult to keep using lux/blender. If I step away for a few weeks/months then in order to get the latest lux features I also need to try and find a compatible combination of blender/luxblend/lux which can be a bit challenging - especially for new users.

Blender is a great free tool and if the API had been stable then I don't think we'd be at this point. But hey, they've got their goals as has been pointed out and I don't think the lux community bears them ill will, its just a question of incompatibility.

That was exactly what I was hoping to point out. I hope no one here interprets a discussion like this as though we are all pointing our canons towards the Blender devs. In fact, we should thank them for the giving us an opportunity to bring Lux to the front a little sooner than had we done it without them. Just because the API stability is not convenient for Lux doesn't mean that we should dislike them...after all, they have been very clear about their project goals with respect to their API. I think they haven't done anything wrong. They have most certainly helped a lot of us get to the places we are as a community and also as professionals.

[Ze_Blob]

I would be happy to know more about that Lux Studio you all seem to have in mind. Because, I may be wrong, but i fear it's a false good solution. First and foremost doing 3D in general is not easy and will never be unless you want deliberately something for children or grand ma. Photography can be easy with a point and shoot camera but what worths the result ?

If you want to make Luxrender accessible to others then why not integrate a talent-generator ? You know you have a button to click and hop, voilà, you have a master piece than you can show to your friends. Then you remove the humans totally and let the world run by machines. And that would be so great if you are fan of Terminator.

Blender like any other 3D app is complex and all the features are useful. For instance imagine you decide that animation is not the goal of Lux Studio. So you will have to deal with Blender for the animation, export the objects and fiddle in your Lux Studio application separately for the shaders. Very nice but what if you would want to animate some shaders parameters ?

You can remove a lot of stuff, at first LuxStudio will be easily maintainable, simple and smart but it will nevertheless oblige you to have a Blender (or maya or max) project and aside of it some settings for LuxStudio, two project files. It's not very user friendly. Specially if there are some redundancy between LuxStudio and Blender. You will have to chose where to set a given parameter, probably a lot of confusion for the newbies as well to find a good workflow, it doesn't look that brilliant to me.

Sometimes i find Blender very badly conceived, and unintuitive but i have to admit it's an overall good all-in-one package and there is not actually a FOSS alternative. The current Blender 2.6 is supposedly to be "stable" but if you have followed the Blender development you know that they suddenly claimed that Blender was stable again, whereas it was still requiring a lot of polishing and core achievement.

Just realize 2 minutes that they are now going to switch the whole thing to Bmesh and that there will be probably quite a lot of instabilities that will hit the average joe during the next 2, 4 or 6 months. I don't known, but i don't think we cannot bash them for changing the API since Blender is so a moving target actually, it's more a beta quality software than anything (for instance all the exporters are crashing constantly). It is how it is. It's a good thing if you consider that the underlaying changes are necessary, but yeah it sucks badly under its unachieved condition.

And it sucks badly not just for Luxrender users. I am not sure you can have a lot of satisfaction using Cycles right now, the old internal is appealing to those who don't need GI, but I am afraid there are a declining population. The Game Engine allows some experimentations but was never used commercially for any serious games. Not sure how usable it is right now. And so on. Quite a mixed bag, but it has the merit to exist and to move fast.

An independant Studio app won't bring you something as integrated than Blender, forking Blender is a joke as you don't have the resources to do so in term of man power. You can restraint yourself to a set of patchs that you will develop on your side, but it will not be a true fork in the sense of really taking the leadership of the project.

All you can do is to wait they stabilize the API and eventually constitute a group of pressure (kind of a lobby, lol) with the other people working on other engines like Yafaray to obtain a specific set of features. May be you should stick with blender 2.61 (or 2.62) from now on and don't support officially the next releases until Bmesh is usable.

I think it would be a better idea for the Blender foundation to stop developing engines, and refocus Blender development as a fully open and versatile multi-engines solution. Well, they can maintain some engines aside of Blender but stop presenting them as the primary ones. Blender should only be the 3D modeling suite and let people choose what they want. Unless the Blender foundation goes very big they won't have the resources to be brilliant both at the big 3D modeling app thing AND at developing engines at the same time.

May be it's the root of the problem after all. Blender Foundation has made some great things historically but they cannot be good on all fronts. Not being proactive in embracing a more open game, given the speed at which things are moving in this field, may play them some bad tricks.

[rendermagic]

You can remove a lot of stuff, at first LuxStudio will be easily maintainable, simple and smart but it will nevertheless oblige you to have a Blender (or maya or max) project and aside of it some settings for LuxStudio, two project files. It's not very user friendly. Specially if there are some redundancy between LuxStudio and Blender. You will have to chose where to set a given parameter, probably a lot of confusion for the newbies as well to find a good workflow, it doesn't look that brilliant to me.

Good to see so many chiming in. The Lux Studio proposal would entail all settings to be made in Lux Studio and all geometry manipulation to take place in a modelling program of your choice (ie. Blender). So, you wouldn't need to define some settings in Blender and others in Lux Studio. All of your render settings (ie. camera settings, material settings, light settings, and positioning of objects in a scene) would be defined in Lux Studio. I also do believe it would be confusing if one were to try and define them in both applications, or even worst, try to define some render settings in Blender and some render settings in Lux Studio.

...but i don't think we cannot bash them for changing the API since Blender is so a moving target actually, it's more a beta quality software than anything (for instance all the exporters are crashing constantly). It is how it is. It's a good thing if you consider that the underlaying changes are necessary, but yeah it sucks badly under its unachieved condition...

I agree...I don't think we have room to bash them and I believe we shouldn't. And that's why with their "API moving target" causes such great difficulty for Lux Blend to continue its development.

[jeanphi]

Hi Ze_Blob,

There's a discussion in the LuxGUI subforum if you want to see what is being discussed.
The Blender developers are perfectly entitled to work on a rendering engine, I have absolutely no problem with that, nor with the fact that they need to do some huge core evolutions. However once you declare a version stable, it'd be nice to make those disruptive changes in another branch.
Trying to do a LuxStudio even if it doesn't succeed in the end will help improve our API so that the future integration of LuxRender into exporters will be even better. So it is a worthy goal.

Jeanphi

[Ze_Blob]

Ah, interesting thread indeed, it seems you need this program to develop further the interactivity of Luxrender. But will it be anything more than a prototype ? True that there are some users that use Sketchup and they may need a simple proggy to set the shaders, but after all do they really need such a level of sophistication ? I mean a good library of existing materials can be more suited.

...but i don't think we cannot bash them for changing the API since Blender is so a moving target actually

Oops, the added double negation was an error. It was late at night and English is not my native language, fortunately you have understood it right.

[filanwizard]

I didnt know things where that bad with Blender. But then again I use Blender because its the best modeling program I can find, legally free that is.

[pciccone]

Additionally, I would like to underscore the importance of implementing some sort of way of making a Lux Studio app not only API friendly, but also DLL friendly. I think it would be really nice if one could drop an executable in a folder that brings specific commercial functions to life while accessing the Lux core.

I agree with this but it's not going to happen unless the licensing of Lux is changed. The GPL 3 is as "commercial unfriendly" as you can make a license and it will prevent anybody with a commercial program to even look at linking with Lux. Using the MIT or LGPL license would change this completely and open the possibility for a tight interaction between commercial software and LuxRender.

Best.

[Jack Eden]

My switch to LuxRender was a bumpy path and would never happened had it not been for Andrew Price and his BlenderGuru tutorial that he did on how to use LuxRender along with Blender 2.49. I can't help but think that there are many other people out there that have, or could have, a similar story to mine. This may be a little long winded but I think it makes a point.

My brain operates much more in the "artist" vein than it does in the "coder/developer" vein and just the overwhelming feeling of learning one more thing that seems foreign to what is shipped with blender is a big hurdle. When I watched Andrew Price's tutorial all I had was a PPC Mac, but I was so impressed and the tutorial was so thorough in showing how to make the software work that I went and bought a cheep intel machine and loaded Linux Ubuntu on it in order to learn Lux. Just figuring out how to get a script working inside of either Blender 2.49 or Blender 2.5 was a challenge. Once I figured that out, I was able to move on to the next step which was learning a new materials system.

I don't want there to be a division between Blender and LuxRender, because these are what I have spent many hours learning how to use. The key to being more influential inside of the Blender community is getting more LuxRender users who are also using blender. I think there are a lot of "artists" out there who would like to use a more powerful renderer, but the biggest hurdle is learning how to do it. Many of these artists default to whatever is the easiest option. Also, I am sure there are already a lot more tutorials on how to use cycles than there are tutorials on LuxRender, despite LuxRender's being around significantly longer.

I come to LuxRender as a profesional photographer, so I really appreciate the "real world" camera and lighting features that allow me to translate exactly what I know about photography in the real word to lighting in LuxRender. I can't get that with Cycles, so I am here to stay.

What LuxRender needs is a marketing plan to get more people to use LuxRender. We need a critical mass of users in order to achieve more of a voice when it comes to API integration, even though I don't really understand what that means, I am just parroting what I have read in this thread. The only way to achieve a larger user base is more tutorials and on a more regular basis, and tutorials that better feature what LuxRender is capable of artistically. There are a lot of LuxRender tutorials where what is happening in the scene is "technical" but not "beautiful." It is illustrating the point, but doesn't get the point across that LuxRender is a tool for creating artistically beautiful stuff. Tutorials that really shine, where the whole tutorial is a beautiful scene that is amazing and eye catching is what is needed. We need to think of tutorials as commercials, as a marketing piece, and this includes the wiki.

So I want to do my part. I have been a silent Lux user for a few years, but I am making a living right now (not necessarily a good one) as a Blender/LuxRender user, and I can't contribute on the coding side as I have no skill or aptitude there, but I can contribute a lot on the marketing side, the tutorials and documentation that will make it easier for more people to make the switch to something that is scary and foreign to them in order for them to become better artists, and more specifically on a technical level that is more on the playing field of the general 3D artist. With a critical mass of users I think we could get more done when it comes to working with the Blender community. So I need to roll up my sleeves and get to work on some of these.

Thoughts? Is this heresy? I know this goes against the general tone of this thread.

[J the Ninja]

My switch to LuxRender was a bumpy path and would never happened had it not been for Andrew Price and his BlenderGuru tutorial that he did on how to use LuxRender along with Blender 2.49. I can't help but think that there are many other people out there that have, or could have, a similar story to mine. This may be a little long winded but I think it makes a point.

My brain operates much more in the "artist" vein than it does in the "coder/developer" vein and just the overwhelming feeling of learning one more thing that seems foreign to what is shipped with blender is a big hurdle. When I watched Andrew Price's tutorial all I had was a PPC Mac, but I was so impressed and the tutorial was so thorough in showing how to make the software work that I went and bought a cheep intel machine and loaded Linux Ubuntu on it in order to learn Lux. Just figuring out how to get a script working inside of either Blender 2.49 or Blender 2.5 was a challenge. Once I figured that out, I was able to move on to the next step which was learning a new materials system.

I don't want there to be a division between Blender and LuxRender, because these are what I have spent many hours learning how to use. The key to being more influential inside of the Blender community is getting more LuxRender users who are also using blender. I think there are a lot of "artists" out there who would like to use a more powerful renderer, but the biggest hurdle is learning how to do it. Many of these artists default to whatever is the easiest option. Also, I am sure there are already a lot more tutorials on how to use cycles than there are tutorials on LuxRender, despite LuxRender's being around significantly longer.

I come to LuxRender as a profesional photographer, so I really appreciate the "real world" camera and lighting features that allow me to translate exactly what I know about photography in the real word to lighting in LuxRender. I can't get that with Cycles, so I am here to stay.

What LuxRender needs is a marketing plan to get more people to use LuxRender. We need a critical mass of users in order to achieve more of a voice when it comes to API integration, even though I don't really understand what that means, I am just parroting what I have read in this thread. The only way to achieve a larger user base is more tutorials and on a more regular basis, and tutorials that better feature what LuxRender is capable of artistically. There are a lot of LuxRender tutorials where what is happening in the scene is "technical" but not "beautiful." It is illustrating the point, but doesn't get the point across that LuxRender is a tool for creating artistically beautiful stuff. Tutorials that really shine, where the whole tutorial is a beautiful scene that is amazing and eye catching is what is needed. We need to think of tutorials as commercials, as a marketing piece, and this includes the wiki.

So I want to do my part. I have been a silent Lux user for a few years, but I am making a living right now (not necessarily a good one) as a Blender/LuxRender user, and I can't contribute on the coding side as I have no skill or aptitude there, but I can contribute a lot on the marketing side, the tutorials and documentation that will make it easier for more people to make the switch to something that is scary and foreign to them in order for them to become better artists, and more specifically on a technical level that is more on the playing field of the general 3D artist. With a critical mass of users I think we could get more done when it comes to working with the Blender community. So I need to roll up my sleeves and get to work on some of these.

Thoughts? Is this heresy? I know this goes against the general tone of this thread.

Help me make this page prettier: http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/New_in_1.0