Lux-a-thon?

[paco]

I've been floating the idea of having some sort of lux "event" where the community get together to render something - for 24 hours people try and render as much as we can and see what we can produce. Maybe hang out on IRC (which a lot of us do anyway) and just get together. The point is really just to have fun.

I'm interested to see what everyone thinks, or if they have any suggestions.

Current ideas have been:

1) A single image -but rendered to an insanely high number of samples
2) A very large image (gigapixel!) - ie something like http://mandelwerk.com/
3) An animation

There are various issues that will come up, like how we are going to stitch things together etc, but we can figure that out as we go. I'm leaning towards an animation because we can get a high quality scene thats not too big in terms of download/RAM and it's something thats not often done with lux (this being a notable exception viewtopic.php?f=15&t=6228). Maybe BinaryCortex could lend us a competition round at some point to choose the scene.

Anyway, anyone interested?

[MaRo]

Nice idea!
I'd be happy to participate.

[SATtva]

Me too inclined for the animation. However, i personally think the example above is not the best one at all: as leonnn1 has correctly noted, you can get a very convincing and similarly looking results even with many real-time rendering engines.

What i'd really like to see is a showcase of Lux capabilities in a short animation. It doesn't need to be anything fancy or hard to rig. Almost anyone can create some moving/rotating objects and/or the camera which will emphasize refraction, dispersion and volumetric effects along with other materials -- those things Lux is best for.

[B.Y.O.B.]

We could make a LuxRender-Showreel (or better: a LuxRender Features Demo) - am I getting you right, SATtva?

[A-man]

I'm in! A scene that could make use of hybrid would be awesome, because of the extra speed boost most people could get, but as I understand not all of Luxrender's best features are supported by hybrid.

[SATtva]

We could make a LuxRender-Showreel (or better: a LuxRender Features Demo) - am I getting you right, SATtva?

Yep, something along these lines. Maybe we could conduct several such Lux-a-thon events -- one for each feature -- such that any single animation isn't too long to render.

[Lord Crc]

Motion blurred rotation of a prism with the dispersion showing in the homogeneous medium would certainly show off things, but I suspect we'd need more than 24 hours

[Meelis]

Motion blurred rotation of a prism with the dispersion showing in the homogeneous medium would certainly show off things, but I suspect we'd need more than 24 hours

Yeah,
We can't even get rendered single frame in that short time showing colored dispersion rays in heavy dusty or fogy medium.
Or we might render ultra low resolution short animation. Avatar size gif or 240p 360p video.

1-2 sec promo commercial clip 400x100 pix with all the cool stuff.

[SATtva]

Motion blurred rotation of a prism with the dispersion showing in the homogeneous medium would certainly show off things, but I suspect we'd need more than 24 hours

Almighty Dade and GPGPU will save us all.

[paco]

Ok, well animation seems the most popular.

Now the question is

1) What parameters should we go for both in terms of time/ resoution/ s/p ?

2) How do we choose the animation? Competiton? Should we choose a bunch of short clips and link them together for a demo reel or just do one longer single scene?