Luxrender Real Time integration with Blender 2.5

Bart · July 2, 2010

Luxrender developer David Bucciarelli has made another preview video. It shows a new rendering technique called Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping. You’ll also see the new 2.5 blender exporter where you can edit the scene and see the changes in real time.

Author Bart

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.

40 responses

txrx

2 July 2010 at 12:05

Awesome work, spotted this on the Graphicall headline earlier. Most impressive :)

samiboy

2 July 2010 at 12:51

The real fun starts about six minutes in. This is fantastic. Great, great work.

ajedros

2 July 2010 at 13:04

I apologize for my english.

I invite you to visit the official website of LuxRender.

http://www.luxrender.net/

Greetings from Colombia.

dusty

2 July 2010 at 13:17

Holy Cow!!!!!!!

I was litterally about to purchase Octane Render!! I a matter of minutes! But you know what, I might wait. This is a REALLY exciting!

Awsome stuff!!

b1tm@n

2 July 2010 at 13:31

omg! omg!!

EagleWing

2 July 2010 at 14:21

This is amazing! Does any other software package have this or is Blender first!

Enrique

2 July 2010 at 14:23

WoW, this seems to be a huge advance in the rendering process!!

jakk

2 July 2010 at 14:38

Totally awesome. I bought Octane Render and it is cool, but The people over at Lux are really pushing development in awesome ways.

This integration with Blender is simply amazing and pushes Blender and Lux into a whole new arena together.

I believe that apart from Pixologic, Blender and Luxrender are the most highly developed CG programs. Why can’t the commercial products even come close?

Thank you all (developers and users) so much for all of your talent!

abhifx

2 July 2010 at 15:06

this is awesome!!!! wooooaaahhh!

FreeMind

2 July 2010 at 15:15

Will luxrender be integrated into Blender so that renders appear in Blenders render window anytime?

rcallicotte

2 July 2010 at 15:29

I can’t wait to see this happen.

kfractal

2 July 2010 at 15:36

very nice. very nice. looking forward to reading up on the parts of the system making use of gpu computing. surprisingly fast!

EMG

2 July 2010 at 15:45

A.M.A.Z.I.N.G

TheOtherBlenderFan

2 July 2010 at 15:56

I’m not cognizant of any other fully fleshed package that can do this. I’m somewhat floored.

If Luxrender were more tightly integrated with Blender, then we would see other packages greatly benefit, as well.

Can you imagine how much NPR renders such as Freestyle would greatly benefit from this?

3sie3wiel

2 July 2010 at 16:00

@EagleWing – Yes -> Photoview 360 by modo (now owned by SolidWorks) also has this technology. Theirs is a bit more advanced, but is gonna cost you a couple thousand $. This is for free!!!

ajedros

2 July 2010 at 16:39

Article made by Allan Brito, published right here on June 30.

http://www.blender3darchitect.com/2010/06/interactive-real-time-render-for-architecture-in-blender-2-50/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Blender3dArchitect+%28Blender+3D+Architect%29

ajedros

2 July 2010 at 16:43

Also on their website (in Portuguese) on June 30.

http://www.allanbrito.com/

Mitch

2 July 2010 at 16:58

Amazing stuff. Thanks for sharing.

blood

2 July 2010 at 17:25

this is so cool!!! *jaw drop*

MmAaXx

2 July 2010 at 17:42

I invite all to try this engine… is not “fully” integrated in blender just beacuse you have a different render window and you have not the power of render nodes… but material, camera and lights have thier own panel and are fully integrated in the interface :)

Moolah

2 July 2010 at 18:01

Hey, people!
I tried to install the exporter for Blender 2.5 (latest build) and got the same as described here:

http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=4166

How it can be fixed? What’s wrong?

Sammy

2 July 2010 at 18:55

This is awesome….the only other package i have see featuring this is Modo.

DreamArtist

2 July 2010 at 20:18

Is it technically possible that we use LuxRays inside blender internal renderer to speed up rendering? How easy is it to change current code for this?

LuisE

2 July 2010 at 20:50

Not good news… but excelent news! congrats!!

MattH

2 July 2010 at 21:31

Is this available now?

pop850

2 July 2010 at 21:50

thats awesome!!!

nrk

3 July 2010 at 02:07

For those interested. I’ve loaded this up and have been testing it on my machine. You need to have an OpenCL capable video card. I barely squeaked in with my ATI Radeon 4870, but the newer cards (last six months) pretty much all do it(not sure on this one, double check me on this). You also need to install the LATEST drivers with opencl support for your card along with the opencl plugins etc. It took me a couple of HOURS to get my ATI drivers upgraded properly (those drivers act like viruses and won’t uninstall sometimes). Since then I’ve noticed glitches on my older card and am longing for an upgrade. Also, they haven’t gotten textures working yet, but in my mind that’s the only major thing missing at this point other than bugs(like mesh material setting missing when smalluxgpu selected, can’t have two objects share a material without it crashing etc, minor deals mostly). I also want a second monitor so I can put lux on one and blender on the other for this feature. I have been modelling and rendering with this (I know I shouldn’t but I can’t help it) and I LOVE IT!

krn

3 July 2010 at 09:16

is it possible to render animations too?

3 July 2010 at 10:04

@krn: yes, there is support for rendering animations, both from within blender and offline – examples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPU6xNNCE68
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M388J319N18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go2PTuEGfkU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPjsvA5f4pE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xieT7b3lVo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEk9xgTnt7Q
http://vimeo.com/12361117

And others. See the luxrender.net core->GPU forum for more info.

txrx

3 July 2010 at 11:20

@nrk – thanks for the explanation. I had OpenCL working on the 1st public release of this only to see it stall now. I think I’m needing to update drivers here as well :)

konrad_ha

3 July 2010 at 12:24

It took a while to set up, but once I got it working: OMFG!

This takes rendering to the next level. I’ve seen similar things demonstrated with VRay and Max, but here I am, working with photorealistic lighting in real-time, FOR FREE!

Guys, this is amazing!

Gerbin

3 July 2010 at 13:36

This is superb news!!!!!

Thanks to all the developers for the hard work. Free software is the best!!

endi

4 July 2010 at 00:08

it is possible to bake with external renderers like this?

Charon

4 July 2010 at 12:40

Very nice feature! Too bad real time is not equal to instant.

victor_

4 July 2010 at 20:38

Very impressive indeed !

@krn : yes there is animation possibilities but it is still in heavy development, SLG is a proof of concept for luxrender 0.8, not a production renderer

@endi : there is no backing option, but it would’t be usefull in most cases because specular/glossy/reflections are view dependant

@charon: of course it is not instant but it would be hard to be quicker than openGL display – which can already be slow in some cases ;)

Alf!Q

4 July 2010 at 21:18

This is future of the video games i think…. :D
VERY GREAT JOB GUYS its looks and works awesome, but i dont have a expensive and power full gpu for test it xD

endi

4 July 2010 at 22:14

victor_, of course specular and reflections never used in baking…
but GI or something may be useful wit these good renderers

victor_

4 July 2010 at 22:30

endi, ok ! I would be interested in baking too but that was the statement in Lux forum… suggested workarround was to manualy bake with orthographic projections.

txrx

5 July 2010 at 00:18

I’ve had a quick tinker with this today, got it sort of working but the latest Beta (16b4) is still to show up a win32 build for me :(

None the less from what did work (and the fact that an Nvidia 8800gtx does NOT have the same kick as our man’s video with 2x ATI cross fire setup of some sort!) I am still very, very impressed with the progress that’s being done here.

It’s going to hopefully be a working pipeline that commercial apps also surely must take notice of and introduce similar if not equally amazing results using openCL in months to come.

Maybe we can start seeing some Graphicall all-in-one builds with all the needed elements combined one day ;)

chriss

5 July 2010 at 09:36

@txrx

thats what i’m waiting for :)
Luxrender should be a part of blender, this is really astonishing!

any chance of getting this run on a mac?

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