Luxus and shaders from daz3d.com?
Fetito
Posts: 481
Hello!
How does the "Luxus"-renderer work with shaders which I bought on daz3d.com? I am referring to the following products:
Lighting Presets for Architectural Visualization
Carrara Surface and Skin Shaders
Carrara Skies Lightdomes 1
Luxus can use them without problems or do I have to tweak a lot?
Thank you!
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Comments
None of these will work with Luxus, especially since two of these products are not shader sets at all, they are light sets.
The Lightdomes are an alternate to global illumination.... Luxus *is* global illumination, so a lightdome is not needed.
The Lighting for Architecture is similar, but I believe this product uses Carrara's GI - again Luxus's whole purpose is GI and uses it's own lights and shader trees in Carrara.
The surface and skin shaders are actually shaders, but with each new render engine you need engine-specific lights and shaders... You may be able to hack some of the information in these shaders in a Lux shader, but the settings will not be the same and the subsurface effects will not be the same - basically you are looking at rebuilding the entire shader (might be a click or two, might be the whole shader needs to be rethought...)
Think of a Carrara scene (or any 3D scene) as basically 3 main components: Geometry, Surface Shaders, and Lighting (and also a camera).
Carrara comes with a few render engines:
- The Photorealistic Renderer (which is superb in its category),
- The Non-Photorealistic Renderer (is so-so, and suppose to look like a painting or charcoal/pastels drawing)
- Draft Renderer (which is mostly useless)
With plugins you can add other render engines like Lux, WireframePro, ToonPro, etc.
All these render engines will use the same geometry in your scene, but the way they handle lights and shaders are all different. In some cases (like Non Photoreal and ToonPro) you can do a Photoreal base render and use it for the basis (underneath) the addon renderer... You can set up your scene as normal and then simply "turn on" the plugin renderer with minor tweaking.
HOWEVER with Lux, this is not possible as the plugin writes a Lux scene file and sends the data out to the Lux Renderer. You have to set up special lights and shaders in Carrara to communicate with the Lux Renderer... This means changing ALL your existing lights to Lux compatible lights, and changing ALL of your scene shaders to one of the Lux Shader trees. It can be a time consuming process, especially if you have a large complex scene.... Somewhat less daunting to start the scene from scratch and change every shader and light as you go..., but basically the scenes are not compatible. You will not be able to render with Carrara's Photoreal renderer once you are using Lux Lights and Shaders.
When thinking about Luxus, it might be helpful to imagine that Lux Render is a stand-alone 3D program without an Assembly Room or Shader Room.... Carrara is used to assemble. light, and texture your scene before sending it over to the Lux Render engine....
I am not trying to discourage you from using the Luxus plugin, it is very cool and a different look to Carrara's built in render engine, but scenes have to be set up specifically for Lux.... You can't simply go back and forth.
Great information for the uninitiated Holly! Thanks for taking the time to write that excellent explanation!
@holly wetcircuit: you rule! thank you for the information!