Lux Render weirdness

vwrangler

I'm having this strange issue with Lux Render 1.1 and I'm hoping that there's some simple fix.

In earlier editions of Lux, I used to be able to start an image, then save and exit and come back and finish rendering later. However, now, if I Save and Exit, then try to start up again from the Recent Files option, Lux starts over again from scratch, wiping out the old file.

Is there a setting or something I need to toggle to make that stop happening?

(I've also noticed 1.1 has a bad habit of misplacing some of its .ply files so that renders will suddenly turn white because it no longer knows what an image looks like, but that's far less frequent. The save issue is a major pain.)

cwichura

Lux 1.1 has a bug that causes it to not save the film file. (See here for all the gory details.) The work around is to switch to the queue tab after starting Lux and click the 'write FLM' override checkbox to turn on the film file. This was fixed pretty quickly, but there is no release version with the fix as I recall. If you switch to LuxRender 1.2RC1, see here for important information on how Lux 1.2 changes loop displacement.

On your comment about misplacing ply files. I suspect what you are actually having issues with is surfaces that use MLIE in Studio. Studio 4.5 creates the MLIE result as a temporary .tif file, which is deleted when Studio clears its temporary directory (which happens any time you start or exit Studio). When Lux can't find the missing .tif file, it uses the default material settings for the surface, which is the white surface you mention. To work around this, use the 'collect textures' option in Reality when you have a project that uses MLIE. Don't forget to set the texture quality to 'max' when you do this.

vwrangler

cwichura said:

Lux 1.1 has a bug that causes it to not save the film file. (See here for all the gory details.) The work around is to switch to the queue tab after starting Lux and click the 'write FLM' override checkbox to turn on the film file. This was fixed pretty quickly, but there is no release version with the fix as I recall. If you switch to LuxRender 1.2RC1, see here for important information on how Lux 1.2 changes loop displacement.

Ah, OK. Not something I was doing wrong then. Good to know, and good to hear that the temp fix is so simple. I don't need anything that 1.2 offers badly enough to switch to the release candidate before the final version is out and before Paolo does the fix for the displacement issue in Reality.

On your comment about misplacing ply files. I suspect what you are actually having issues with is surfaces that use MLIE in Studio. Studio 4.5 creates the MLIE result as a temporary .tif file, which is deleted when Studio clears its temporary directory (which happens any time you start or exit Studio). When Lux can't find the missing .tif file, it uses the default material settings for the surface, which is the white surface you mention. To work around this, use the 'collect textures' option in Reality when you have a project that uses MLIE. Don't forget to set the texture quality to 'max' when you do this.

They were surfaces using MLIE, so that makes perfectly good sense. (Also happens with Geometry Shell sometimes, as it turns out.) Thanks for the tip on that, and thanks so much for your help!

mjc1016

When rendering in an external renderer, (Lux, the standalone 3Delight, Blender, etc) it's always a good idea to use the 'collect texture' feature of the exporter. That way, if you wanted you could even close down Studio and the render will still complete, because most exporters, it seems use the temp folder to pull the textures from...as opposed to the original path to them. Collecting them also has another advantage...you could, if you wanted, send the entire folder with the collected textures over to another machine to render.