image by J.Peter Lloyd

LuxRender is a free and unbiased renderer. The program is the result of the dedication of a loosely nit team of passionate people around the world.

goals

Our aim is to provide artists with a powerful tool to create extremely realistic and accurate images. While going through great lengths to make the program as easy to use and flexible as possible, we will not compromise on quality and physical correctness

philosophy

LuxRender is and will always remain free software. We are working on this program because we like doing so, because we enjoy seeing people use the program and because we consider freedom more valuable than money.

Whether you're a starving artist or own a multi million company, we invite you to use this program and hope it will be useful to you.

history

LuxRender is based on PBRT, the unbiased raytracer developed by Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys for academic use. Pharr and Humphreys were kind enough to provide the source code of their program under the terms of the GPL, thus making the program free software.

In 2007, a small group of programmers led by Terrence Vergauwen took on the challenge to modify the program and make it suitable for artistic use. Late 2007, the initial version of LuxRender was released. With the release of LuxRender 0.5 in June 2008, the program was considered to be usable enough for general use. Since then, the rendering speed and the number of features and available exporters has been growing steadily.