LuxC4D 0.06

[abstrax]

Hi Folks,

Here is the new version of LuxC4D. I was and still am on holiday so didn't have much time to do a lot. Anyway, the new version includes the following changes:

- added light portal tag
- added support for camera setting in stage object, i.e. you can specify a render camera using the stage object while using a different camera in the editor
- added support UV shift and scale parameters in texture tag
- added support for luminance channel in C4D standard materials
- added support for light groups in LuxC4D light tag (if no light group name is specified the light will belong to the default group "_default")
- added a lot of code commentary, which was missing from previous versions (still incomplete - but I'm getting there)

The portal tag can be applied to any geometry objects. Every object that has a portal tag will be exported as light portal and will be invisible. Light portals are used to concentrate sampling onto areas that are covered by portals (e.g. windows) and with that don't waste sample compute time for unimportant areas, that don't contribute much to the brightness of a surface. You can find more information about light portals here:
http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/index.php/Portals

I have added two features to the portal tag that (hopefully) improve the workflow:

- By enabling "Export Portal + Object" the object gets exported as portal and as geometry with the assigned material. This helps for example if you have an architectural scene that includes a few window objects which should be rendered (e.g. using a glass material) and which also define the shape of the openeing from where the sun/day light is coming from. Keep in mind though that usually architectural windows have a thickness which means that the portal defines two surfaces: One pointing inward and one pointing outward. This slows down rendering and can be solved with the second feature:
- By enabling "Simplify to Rectangle" the portal geometry will be a simple axis-aligned rectangle that covers the complete geometry nearly optimal. It is basically one of the 6 sides of the bounding box of the portal geometry. By specifying the face direction you can select which of these 6 sides will be used as portal. If you have for example a window object of which the Z axis points into the building you should set "Face Direction" to "Z+".

As usual the current LuxC4D source code can be downloaded from here:
http://www.luxrender.net/hg

The French translation was done by Spirou4D again

For the last version 0.06c of LuxC4D please go to http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=3064

Happy rendering,
Marcus


EDIT: I have updated the Windows version to fix the problem of emissive materials being applied to child objects. The Mac build will follow tomorrow.
EDIT 2: The Mac builds are up-to-date now, too
EDIT 3: Removed plugin archives to avoid that people download the broken version.

[iacx]

Thanks abstrax...! Great work!

[Camox]

Wooha GREAT WORK ! much thx abstrax

[dataflow]

good to see some more added feature for c4d.

[Juan_Render]

Great work, abstrax!
A little annoyance with this release: with the introduction of the use of luminosity channel in C4D materials, now there is a little bug: if the same material is applied to more than one object, then the material becomes self-illuminated when rendered in Lux, unless you set the luminosity channel to 0, or you create copies of the same material and apply it to every object as you need.
I´m using C4D V11 32 bits in Windows.
Many thanks!

[abstrax]

Great work, abstrax!
A little annoyance with this release: with the introduction of the use of luminosity channel in C4D materials, now there is a little bug: if the same material is applied to more than one object, then the material becomes self-illuminated when rendered in Lux, unless you set the luminosity channel to 0, or you create copies of the same material and apply it to every object as you need.
I´m using C4D V11 32 bits in Windows.
Many thanks!

Thanks for the bug report. I will look into this this night. I think it will not be hard to solve.

Cheers,
Marcus

[Phoenix]

Great work, abstrax!
A little annoyance with this release: with the introduction of the use of luminosity channel in C4D materials, now there is a little bug: if the same material is applied to more than one object, then the material becomes self-illuminated when rendered in Lux, unless you set the luminosity channel to 0, or you create copies of the same material and apply it to every object as you need.
I´m using C4D V11 32 bits in Windows.
Many thanks!

Thanks for the bug report. I will look into this this night. I think it will not be hard to solve.

Cheers,
Marcus

Have you solved it?

[abstrax]

Have you solved it?

Sorry, that it took so long. Beside doing other stuff I was processing a few hundred holiday photos.

I have uploaded a new version for Windows which hopefully will fix the problem. I'm not sure if this is the actual problem, but it looks as if LuxRender applies an area light (emission channel) to all objects and child objects of an attribute scope. As I was exporting scene hierarchy as a hierarchy to Lux, this means that if you apply an emissive material to an object, the emission channel gets applied all child objects, too.

To solve the problem, I'm now flattening the hierarchy again (as I did it in earlier releases) and explicitely export the material of every polygon object. I hope this solves the issues.

As said, the Windows binaries are up-to-date, while the Mac binaries will be updated tomorrow.

If there are more problems, please tell me about them.

Cheers,
Marcus

[abstrax]

Hi.

I just updated the Mac builds of LuxC4D.

Happy rendering,
Marcus

[forgeflow]

I'm consistently getting this error when I try to export and render:

Path '/Applications/LuxRender/LuxRender.app' doesn't exist / is invalid!

I've set the preferences several different ways and I'm now at a loss. Exporting and manually opening the .lxs file in LuxRender does work.