LuxRender v0.8 final Release

[jeanphi]

Hi all,

We are pleased to release a new stable version of LuxRender. This is the first release to feature a somewhat usable GPU acceleration, but it's not yet complete (limited to path integrator with single light sampling). We have great plans to extend this support for v0.9.
You can get an overview of the enhancements in our wiki, as you can see from the below list much more has been going on, and even in the list below lots of technical stuff has been filtered out.
Many thanks to all the developers involved in this development cycle, especially the exporter writers for Blender, 3DS Max, DAZ Studio, Poser, XSI, SketchUp who are making great progress to have LuxRender supported by so many 3D packages.
We'll do our best to answer your questions in the forums or in the bug tracker.

Congratulations to moure for the new splash screen.

Packages or installers for most platforms have been made available from our downloads page. Some exporters have been packaged in the installers depending on the platform, so you won't need to separately get them. Packages also include small test scenes from freejack (the winner of our competition) and B.Y.O.B. (the runner up).
For Blender 2.57, you might need to get the following DLLs to have a working smoke export to LuxRender:
- 32 bits platforms: http://www.luxrender.net/release/luxren ... ls_x86.zip
- 64 bits platforms: http://www.luxrender.net/release/luxren ... ls_x64.zip

Changes since v0.8RC4:
- exporter fixes and packaging

Other changes since v0.7.1:
- New GUI options to save render on demand (most file types are supported), with or without separate light groups, statistics overlay, ...
- new glossytranslucent material, initially developed for better leaves rendering
- film response curves to emulate traditional cameras color response (some curve are for black&white films too)
- GPU acceleration for path tracing when sampling one light at a time
- render queue to process several files in batch mode from the GUI
- support for split vertices in mesh subdivision (mesh will no longer open up in the presence of UV/normal seams when subdivided)
- new light groups color handling for better accuracy when adjusting light color
- outlier rejections (this will eat slightly more memory and slow the render a bit, but the noise level will be reduced significantly)
- finally usable exphotonmap integrator
- new band texture to enable complex gradients
- new volume scattering feature atop the volumetric absorption introduced in v0.7 (only homogeneous volumes for now)
- much improved ply mesh loader (supports quads, texture coordinates, subdivision, ...) and export to ply for various exporters instead of lux native (faster export and loading)
- on the fly microdisplacement to allow very high subdivision depths without any memory impact
- various fixes/improvements to the pylux library (should help Blender 2.5 integration, now using python 3.2 to follow Blender change)
- proper volume integrator support warning: behaviour change, the "single" volume integrator will only do single scattering (good for aerial effects), there's a new "multi" volume integrator for multiple scattering (good for SSS)
- improved mesh subdivision, the new "bool dmnormalsplit" option allows to create edges at shading normal splits so that hard edges are preserved by the subdivision
- new "multimix" texture to create arbitrary mixtures of textures
- removal of the "highcontrast" tonemapper
- photon shooting can now be aborted by stopping the render
- film output file path can now be overriden in luxconsole with the -o/--output option
- EXR output is now always linear (no gamma correction) even when tonemapped and post processed
- bidirectional integrator fixes
- volumetrics fixes
- render queue fixes
- nextwork rendering fixes
- the alpha channel is now exported if requested when saving from the GUI
- "environment" camera is no longer horizontally flipped and points in the right direction
- camera response presets so you don't need to keep the files around for most camera film types
- fixes for IPv6 networking support
- fix an issue when using IES profiles on area lights
- better handling of filenames across platforms (\ vs / separator issue)
- ability to load STL meshes
- new advanced tab in the GUI exposing various informations on the render configuration
- ability to use local coordinates, UV coordinates or normal coordinates for Blender and PBRT textures
- fixed light intensity when using an imagemap or bilerp to texture an area light
- new stop button behaviour in the GUI, the render can now be restarted, a new menu option allows a full stop of the render engine
- ability to embed file data inside LuxRender files
- new option for EXR output to output straight colors even with alpha channel (the standard requires that the color is always multiplied by the alpha value)
- ability to load and save tonemapping and post effects parameters in a file
- improve luxconsole statistics output
- make flm file writing more robust
- new color clamping scheme selector in the GUI
- check LuxRender network protocol version when doing network rendering
- fix alpha output when saving from the GUI
- new "solo" (appears as a + or - in the light group title bar) light group selector to disable all light groups but the selected one
- support IES files with comma separators instead of spaces
- add a centering option to the STL mesh loader
- prevent black splotches when using carpaint with the photon mapper
- various fixes and improvements all around

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Source Code

People who want to download the source code can download the v08 tag files of our HG source code repository here:
http://src.luxrender.net/lux/file/45d3e13eb94c

LuxBlend (2.49): http://src.luxrender.net/luxblend/file/99289570529e
LuxBlend (2.57): http://src.luxrender.net/luxblend25/file/9cb3fcee0be8

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Cheers,

Jeanphi

[Lord Crc]

Due to a build snafu, the windows build contain the RC4 text on the splash screen. I'm fixing this ASAP.

edit: fixed

[pciccone]

Congratulations on a very ambitious and fast development cycle. LuxRays is indeed looking like a great GPU platform and the future is looking very promising. This has been a lot of hard work culminated into an incredibly sophisticated rendering engine. Lux is probably one of the fastest growing OSS renderers.

Congratulations!

[Akhbour]

Congrats jeanphi and all the other devs!

Great work and a fantastic renderer in my tool-box!

[J the Ninja]

Wahoo! Great news to come home to!

BlenderArtists thread is up: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthr ... l-released!

[dougal2]

Congrats everyone. This release has been very eagerly awaited and an immeasurable amount of hard work has gone into making it happen. The changelog since 071 is amazing

[MacroManJr]

Congratulations on this milestone, you guys, and truly, I thank you all! Truly, you guys are really awesome! You've included some great features on LuxRender, and did a pretty good job on eliminating any bugs in the system. This final release is working just fine for me! I had no problems with installing (I used the installer for Windows), and got LuxRender v0.8 running on both my Blender 2.49b and Blender 2.57b in no time! I love it when things just work right! Again, I want to thank you all for your hard work and well-spent time in developing this for us all, and as I look forward to your proposed next destination in the near future, v0.9, I'll be putting v0.8 to very good use!

[nrk]

Great Job Gents:) I've really enjoyed 0.8 entire series and congratulate you on this milestone

[Carbonflux]

Wow, looking at the whole list it really seems like a lot of stuff. Great release.

[moure]

Thats an impressive changelog