LuxRender v0.6 Release Candidate 4 - Windows/Linux/MacOSX

[karla]

Does my experience help or assist you guys? I rendered a 4.6M verts scene a couple of times but now it has started to crash each time; reducing verts stops the crash but I am still unsure of the reason. Export to LuxRender executes OK up to "Loading Scene" which halts part way through, then Lux closes down. Linux log shows out of memory but I thought that 3GB should - and did - handle it. I can' think of any significant changes between the working and not working situations; I'll go back to previous files and check it out.

Lux v0.6RC4 64bit
Blender 2.49a 64bit
Ubuntu 9.04 64bit
3GB RAM
Intel Q6600

[SATtva]

What accelerator is selected in LuxBlend's System tab? Try switching to QBVH.

[karla]

Thanks SATtva but I'm afraid that even though I changed from Tabreckdtree to QBVH Acceleration my current file still crashed at Loading Scene stage. The last few hours I've tested it with and without AutoThread, QBVH and Tabreckdtree Acceln., with 4.6M and 0.4M verts, with old and new files. I have had some rendering success - but have not been able to achieve it with 4.6M verts. At the moment I'm unable to reliably predict an outcome - but I'm still pursuing it.
It may be worth noting that, after a successful render, the Lux Log came up with a few messages including: "The system has numerous assumptions ...... no scale factors .....your image may have errors .... the system may crash ...." and also "Scaling detected in world-to-light transformation".
My Blender memory display was about 761M (1.2M) during Geometry Export; I used to get displays of 1450M (58M) just before Blender Internal render crashes under Vista 32 bit (that's why I've moved over to Ubuntu 64bit).

[Lord Crc]

Are all the verts (or a majority) in a single mesh? Or do you have lots and lots of objects?

[karla]

I've been developing a female portrait from a MakeHuman model for the past year, progress publicized in the Blender Artists' WIP forum. There's still plenty to do, the more I learn the more there is to know - skin material properties, eyeball and iris surfaces, teeth light scattering etc. Hair is always a problem and if you get that right you're on the way to convincing the viewer of the reality.

The head, body and accessories meshes total about 0.4M verts and there are currently 12 hair pieces approximately 0.3M verts each. The hair has been modelled from Blender particles converted to square sectioned mesh. The head renders without hair every time (0.4M verts) and rarely renders with all the meshes (4.6M).

Its not a serious issue - I'm having loads of fun and appreciate the comradeship in this field.

[Manuel]

I've been developing a female portrait from a MakeHuman model for the past year, progress publicized in the Blender Artists' WIP forum. There's still plenty to do, the more I learn the more there is to know - skin material properties, eyeball and iris surfaces, teeth light scattering etc. Hair is always a problem and if you get that right you're on the way to convincing the viewer of the reality.

The head, body and accessories meshes total about 0.4M verts and there are currently 12 hair pieces approximately 0.3M verts each. The hair has been modelled from Blender particles converted to square sectioned mesh. The head renders without hair every time (0.4M verts) and rarely renders with all the meshes (4.6M).

Its not a serious issue - I'm having loads of fun and appreciate the comradeship in this field.

Hi to all, hi Karla..very interesting work.
I'm Manuel Bastioni, the admin of MakeHuman project.
Recently we are working on hairs feature, and today I've received an email that tell me LuxRender support this feature (with a link here).
In incoming alpha3 we'll export mainly to renderman engines (Aqsis, 3delight), but (in alpha4?) we like to support LuxRender too. The problem is I've no resources for this task. Write an exporter mh2luxrender is very easy, but we need someone that know luxrender language, and have time to do several rendering experiments with it.
This is latest result done with Aqsis: http://www.makehuman.org/tmp/rendering_test.jpg but looking at Karla's work I think LuxRender can be even more realistic.

Kind Regards,

Manuel

[kuvapuisto]

Hi!

Somehow renderer is crashing quite often. System is WinXP 32-bit. I'm testing to render in network with 4 other computers (Mac) in local network. Everything works fine, but when I'm stopping rendering it crasehes sometimes. Sometimes it crashes after rendering about 10 min. Image is quite big 3500 x 2000 px.

Using Windows 7 (64 bit), Luxconsole crashed all the time, but Macs work fine with it.
It's quite fast to render. 2500 s/px on that size, 16 hours, 70 000 faces, 35 GHz.
Do you have some use for error reports? And is it normal that intel quadcore Mac Pro (2 x 2.8Ghz) is slower (20%) to render than intel core duo iMac (2 x 2.8Ghz). Luxconsole finds all 8 cores, and use of prosessors are ~ 100%BB

Some questions:
1. If one texture-image is lost, nothing works. Could Luxconsole somehow ignore it?
2. Is it possible that renderer would remember ip adresses for slaves? So you don't have to rewrite them every time?
3. Is it possible that when Luxconsole crashes/making some error on slave-computer, it would restart?
4. What is that refine area (not functional)-button? Will it work in 0.6?

One other problem was that after changing one material from glossy to glass, renderer crashed every time. Nothing helped. I put it back to glossy but no.. restarted computer, no. Finally I found that if I hide part of models it renders again. I exported them to other file, impored them back and now it works again...

And thank you very much. I find Luxrender really useful and results are marvellous!

[jensverwiebe]

Hi!


Do you have some use for error reports? And is it normal that intel quadcore Mac Pro (2 x 2.8Ghz) is slower (20%) to render than intel core duo iMac (2 x 2.8Ghz). Luxconsole finds all 8 cores, and use of prosessors are ~ 100%BB

Some questions:
1. If one texture-image is lost, nothing works. Could Luxconsole somehow ignore it?
2. Is it possible that renderer would remember ip adresses for slaves? So you don't have to rewrite them every time?
3. Is it possible that when Luxconsole crashes/making some error on slave-computer, it would restart?
4. What is that refine area (not functional)-button? Will it work in 0.6?

Hi

1: should normally work, but has a fallback to matte for missing material
2. you can setup you network in LuxBlend, either setting all slaves in the field ( seperated by comma --> save it as default) or use a textfile ( each line an IP )
3. dunno
4. Refine is future-work, will make it possible to render additional samples to selected area. It is not functional yet, i should have removed it for now, but forgot it.

Not sure why your 2-core is faster than 4-core, can´t see why. On my 2006 Mac Pro all cores are used fine, but i can´t compare, could you pls do a more dedicated test ?
( not only as slave but rendering a scene on each and compare ? - it could be an issue with Xeon-architecture or someting else, would be great to have it investigated )


Jens

[tomb]

I've been developing a female portrait from a MakeHuman model for the past year, progress publicized in the Blender Artists' WIP forum. There's still plenty to do, the more I learn the more there is to know - skin material properties, eyeball and iris surfaces, teeth light scattering etc. Hair is always a problem and if you get that right you're on the way to convincing the viewer of the reality.

The head, body and accessories meshes total about 0.4M verts and there are currently 12 hair pieces approximately 0.3M verts each. The hair has been modelled from Blender particles converted to square sectioned mesh. The head renders without hair every time (0.4M verts) and rarely renders with all the meshes (4.6M).

Its not a serious issue - I'm having loads of fun and appreciate the comradeship in this field.

Hi to all, hi Karla..very interesting work.
I'm Manuel Bastioni, the admin of MakeHuman project.
Recently we are working on hairs feature, and today I've received an email that tell me LuxRender support this feature (with a link here).
In incoming alpha3 we'll export mainly to renderman engines (Aqsis, 3delight), but (in alpha4?) we like to support LuxRender too. The problem is I've no resources for this task. Write an exporter mh2luxrender is very easy, but we need someone that know luxrender language, and have time to do several rendering experiments with it.
This is latest result done with Aqsis: http://www.makehuman.org/tmp/rendering_test.jpg but looking at Karla's work I think LuxRender can be even more realistic.

Kind Regards,

Manuel

Very interesting indeed - could you repost this in the general section of the exporters subforum? That way more people are likely to read it and respond.

T

[Abel]

1. If one texture-image is lost, nothing works. Could Luxconsole somehow ignore it?

I've filed a bug report for this issue (http://www.luxrender.net/mantis/view.php?id=514) some time ago but I haven't tested it on RC4 myself. The current behaviour is not very consistend; if LuxRender ignores the missing bitmap, luxconsole should do so too.