Luxus for Carrara?? Should I ?

Box8068_31c338ee4b

Hello
I have been reading about Luxus for Carrara. I am very interested in the speed increase of open CL GPU rendering.
My system is a PC Win 7 Proi7, 2nd gen, 16 gig's ram AMD R9 280 video card. Running Carrara 8.1 Pro 64bit.
(I purchased 8.5 pro but never needed it) 8.1 works for me and is quite stable with what I do.

I am very interested in the rendering speed increase.

My work: I do technical education animations. So no plants, seas, humans, hair or animals.
My work falls just short of photo-realistic, so I can accept slight shifts in shaders.
I sometimes use anything glows, glow channel, and PNG texture maps. My lighting is usually as simple as possible.
Often I have two camera's animated.
So my questions.
1) Can I turn Luxus (or another render engine) Off and just use Carrara as I did before Installing.
2) When I open a scene animation I have created before Luxus what tweeking is required to make Luxus work.
(Do I have to tweek all shaders? Cameras? Lights?)
3) I see some command line editing, is there much of this?
4)How stable is it? does it increase crashing?
5)Are there other open CL GPU rendering engines that perform better with Carrara?
( I can't use Cuda with my card)
Will I loose (Aura) on my Glow channel animations?
Thanks You
8068

3DAGE

Ho :)

1./ Yes,.. Luxus is a plug-in to access Lux render,.
it' has nothing to do with the default Carrara render engine,.. which is always there,
you just have a new menu option to render through Luxus, and you also have new shader options to create lux shaders

2./ Depending on the scene and materials, some shaders may need to be adjusted,. since carrara shaders are different from Lux or Octane,.
Lighting is also different,.
Some basic shaders which use texture maps, should auto convert to work in Lux,.
Carrara specific shaders like fractal noise, wood, natural functions, colour gradients etc which wouldn't have any equivalent shader function in Lux , would either need to be rebuilt using Lux shaders options.. or converted to texture maps

3./ You should be able to click go, and that's It,. .. if you want to delve deeper, those options are there.

4./ stability depends on so many factors,. ... If there is a demo version of Luxus, you could try it out.

5./Ii think there are a few renderers which support Open CL However, the only ones with Plugins for Carrara are Luxus and Octane.
A decent Nvidia card shouldn't be a big budget spend,.

Will I loose (Aura) on my Glow channel animations?

Yes,. since the aura is a Carrara rendered effect,. and you're no longer using Carrara's render engine,You could also run the animation through Carrara's renderer, and use Multipass to render the Aura post effect. ..then composite.

Lux and Octane both have emitter shaders, (a bit like anything glows) the shader can be used to create an object which emits light,. so you can model a Bulb or create a Light box, and those models can be used to light your scene,

Box8068_31c338ee4b

3DAGE
Thank you for such a complete answer.
One more question. Are people using Luxrender for just quality, or speed as well.
My question is using Luxrender for animations be faster then Carrara's native render engine or will the higher quality add time to the renders?
I usually max out most settings in carrara when rendering 1920X1080.
I'm fine with Carrara's quality for what I am doing it's reducing render time that I is my big interest.
I'll give Luxrender a shot and get Phil W's shaders. Maybe I could just use in in 8.5 and leave 8.1 alone.
I think I'll try it more for new projects. My goal is to save time so if I need to go back and tweek a bunch of shaders
it might defeat the purpose. I just bought an AMD R9 video card with open CL GPU to use with Sony Vegas ( it gives a huge performance boost in Vegas)
The Nivida CUDA cards don't seem to have current support with Vegas so I want to stick with an Open CL GPU.
From what I hear the open CL is much better on a AMD then Open CL on Nivida. ( to be clear I'm not comparing Open CL to CUDA on Nivida)
Thanks again, hope it works!
8068

3DAGE

HI :)

Are people using Luxrender for just quality, or speed as well.

Both :)

These renderer engines work in a different way to the Standard Carrara renderer.
Firstly,. the image is almost instantly "there", but then the renderer is constantly sampling and re sampling the image and improving it.
unlike the standard "bucket" renderer, which processes small areas to build the entire image

This continual re-sampling of the image can last foe hours if you let it.,. of just a few seconds
You can set how many "Samples" are calculated, for each frame in an animation or still image.

So,.. How long it takes to create an image which you're happy with, is up to you, ...to a certain extent,.
given that the more geometry and lighting.and textures in your scene equals more calculations, equals processing time,
some complex scenes will take longer than others to create an acceptable image.

These renderers uses physically based settings for lighting and shaders. also the camera's have settings for aperture, f stop, etc and are "modelled" on real camera's and film settings like Kodak or Fuju etc..

You can also select different settings or types of render engine to use,. which can be biased or un-biased
and some will render faster because the method of rendering is different.

The best way to see how they work is to download the demos and check out the forums,

You should be able to install 8.5 and also have 8.1 installed,.. if you really want to keep it,..
8.5 has a bunch of improvements over 8.1

It's always nice to have options, .

Also, Check Carrara Cafe, for lux shaders,. I remember doing some shaders for V4 /M4 which should be there somewhere.

3drendero

The free LuxusCore beta for Windows x64 with OpenCL rendering is still available:
http://carraracafe.com/plugins/luxuscore-for-carrara-plugin-unofficial-manual-2015-02-15/

You can try the Luxus plugin for Carrara with Luxrender, DAZ has 30 days money back guarantee:
http://www.daz3d.com/luxus-for-carrara
Manual and other goodies:
http://carraracafe.com/plugins/luxus-the-luxrender-plugin-for-carrara-developmentdocumentation-blog/

Octane for Carrara is NVIDIA only for now, but there are plans for an OpenCL that will support all graphics cards, may take a while.

Box8068_31c338ee4b

Thanks guys
Now I get it, some of the unbiased renders I see look grainy, it's because the time was set short and the image didn't "Fill in" completely.
I guess I'll just have to take the leap and see how it works for my flow.
8068