LuxRender 1.5 RC available

Community Reporter · June 22, 2015

LuxRender 1.5 is a big upgrade over 1.4, offering a biased path engine, adaptive rendering, the embree accelerator, pointiness and more.

Simon Wendsche writes:

The first release candidate of LuxRender 1.5 has been released.
I’m quoting the official announcement:
There has been a tremendous amount of work since the release of v1.4 and we are now very pleased to present you the first v1.5 release candidate. We’re moving along quite nicely towards LuxRender v2.0 and we hope you’ll enjoy that new release.
As for v1.4, LuxRender itself has not seen much changes but the new LuxCore rendering core has gained a lot of features and nearly matches classic LuxRender.
You can get a visual outlook of the new features in the wiki: major speed improvements, volume precedence, new materials and textures, volume emission, strands, better integration in Blender and 3DSMax to name just a few.
Paolo, Reality plugin author, has experimented more than 10x speed improvements with the new rendering modes:

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5 responses

PgtArt

22 June 2015 at 17:49

thats an increadible, are such speed jumps also possible for cycles, (or did cycles allready have them).
i’m wondering what changed their technique to endup ~12 times faster.

also would be nice if it would support cycles node system or does there some kind of conversion tool exist ?

SATtva
22 June 2015 at 19:20
> i’m wondering what changed their technique to endup ~12 times faster.
That was due to a combination of factors from switching to the new architecture (LuxCore) as well as using Embree triangle intersection library for pure CPU rendering.
> also would be nice if it would support cycles node system or does there some kind of conversion tool exist ?
No to both questions. LuxBlend supports automatic conversion of Blender Internal Renderer materials, and even this works out only for the most trivial cases. Automatically converting Cycles node trees is an unmanageable task.
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B.Y.O.B.
22 June 2015 at 19:38
In addition to what SATtva said (new LuxCore architecture, Embree accelerator) it is also due to the fact that LuxCore is using RGB colors while “classic Lux” was spectral. Cycles is also using RGB colors by the way.
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