The venerable open-source physically based renderer, LuxCoreRender, has just shipped its latest 2.5 version offering a slew of updates pushing performance and realism to new heights.
#LuxCoreRender 2.5 is shipping. The #opensource physically based renderer gets support for RTX acceleration on Nvidia GPUs, better Bokeh effects, and new stereo cameras for #VR. The #b3d integration is joined by a new #3dsMax pluginhttps://t.co/iud7SwNXFj#rendering #archviz pic.twitter.com/4E4clvvikb
— CG Channel (@theCGchannel) April 12, 2021
Known for its realism capabilities, the render engine now boasts Optix acceleration support, with performance gains increasing proportionally to the complexity of the scene.
This object with 10 million tris sees a 604% speedup thanks to the new Optix acceleration
Other standout features include better Bokeh, Holdout and Two-Sided materials, randomized tiling and many other texturing improvements.
New "Texture Bombing" automates stencil distribution with randomization options
With this update comes the updated BlendLuxCore addon which completely integrates the render engine to Blender. The updated add-on now offers Optix viewport denoising and a new Light Group workflow (currently missing from native Blender renderers) which can be seen in the video below.
Check out all the updates and get LuxCoreRender on the links below:
3 Comments
Great renderer with lots of well considered ease-of-use options (that Cycles could use too, like e.g. the automated Light Group compositor workflow).
A shame it isn't included standard as the "higher end" renderer in Blenderer, in the same way that Eevee is the "lower end" option. Wouldn't mind if the Luxcore lead developer would take up the current job opening in the Blender rendering team, seeing what he currently already can achieve without Blender's superior resources.
You can do the same thing in Cycles using layers as described here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZD-MTXwP4c&t=1s
What they are both missing is light linking where you can specify which objects one light source will light.
I do like the node they use in the compositor. Makes it easier than building a huge node network manually.
Yes, you could recreate this manually in Cycles, but I think we can agree that LuxCore's approach for this is easier and way more user friendly.
My point was that this care also extends to other areas, like for example automated light portals, assisted calculation of proposed values for light ray filtering, stopping renders based on certain noise thresholds, et cetera.
Now that the once very true argument of LuxCore being a lot slower than Cycles is no longer valid (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRJWDotGxvs ), I truly hope this wonderful free renderer can count on more interest from the community.