Problem rendering in Lux

Marmalade Boy

Hi there-

So I am re-working my James Grey (male version of Jean Grey) character. The test renders I did in Daz were moving along nicely, however, when I tested it in Lux, the darker colors in my diffuse yellow color are washed out. I thought it was because the light's intensity were to high; I turned then down and it's still washed out. Anyone ever experience this in LUX?

mjc1016

Which Luxrender exporter are you using?

Herald of Fire

This has less to do with the render engine and more to do with how you are setting up the materials for Luxrender. The automatic conversions for materials is rarely fully accurate and though plugins like Reality 2.5 and Luxus do a very serviceable job, you will almost certainly want to do some manual tweaks to make it look correct in the final render.

With that in mind, it might be prudent to look at the surfaces involved and make sure they're set up correctly. The wrong kind of material or the wrong settings can easily transform a surface. Post your settings here and perhaps someone can give you more details on how to get the colours back.

millighost

Marmalade Boy said:

Hi there-

So I am re-working my James Grey (male version of Jean Grey) character. The test renders I did in Daz were moving along nicely, however, when I tested it in Lux, the darker colors in my diffuse yellow color are washed out. I thought it was because the light's intensity were to high; I turned then down and it's still washed out. Anyone ever experience this in LUX?

That is very common error;
The Exposure setting in DS is per default set to 1. I think it is 1, because that is the setting that is compatible with the older (and non-pro) poser versions.
However, an exposure = 1 produces a rather dark image with very high contrast when saved in a common file format like png or jpg, because software typically assumes an srgb color space (which corresponds approx. to exposure = 2.2).
So in order to counter that effect of darkened and high-contrast colors people typically used brighter colors, linear pointlights and other contrast diminishing adjustments, in order make the image appear normal.
Now luxrender comes along, and the luxrender developers really do not care about compatibility to old Poser or existing content (or new colors that are created with exposure = 1). So when an image with all these counter-contrast and bright colors is rendered with luxrender, it appears too bright and lacking contrast, i.e. it is "washed out".
In order to get your intended colors, you could either adjust all the colors; when doing test renders use an exposure of 2.2 instead of 1, that way colors will be more or less the same in 3Delight and luxrender. Or you could leave it as it is and do some kind of post processing (tonemapping, curves in photoshop or even luxrender's built-in tonemapper or something like that).

Marmalade Boy

Hi HeraldOfFire,

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, I didn't change any setting as I was only doing a test. I assumed it would look fine and I would then mess around with the setting for the final render. I usually render in Maya but I figured why not try it in Daz/Luxus.

Millighost-

Big thanks to you as well for your detailed explanation. I changed the Tone Liner Exposure (not sure if this is what you were talking about) but it had no effect. I will have a look at the documentation for LuxRender. I also grabbed the Luxus Pro Training video tutorials; perhaps this will offer some insights. However, so far, most of the tutorials pertain to lighting. There is a video called Luxus Materials...fingers crossed.

Marmalade Boy

Wow...fastest update ever---

I watched the 10 min and 38 sec. video on Luxus_Materials part of the tutorial mentioned about and was able to figure it out.

1. I selected my item in the Scene tab,
2. Select the item again on the surface tab
3. Right click on the surface tab and select Lusux - LuxRender material
4. I then selected Matt for material Type and because I have textures already applied, I selected Copy Studio Parameters and clicked
accept.
5. Back on the surface tab, I expanded my item list and clicked on the new item listed (LuxRender)
6. i changed the LuxRender Matte Sigma to 20 I will have to play around with this to get it right but this is the setting that controls the
"contrast"?!? Not sure if contras is the right word but it controls what it is I want to happen. As you can see from the test render, it darken
the blue a bit too much.

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post. I have posted my findings here in hops it will help someone else who is having similar issues.

Shagge

You just saved me I've been trying to figure out the fix to a similar issue and no one could give me a really simple great newbie answer.

Marmalade Boy

Sweet! I always seem to be looking for answers for my issues with the program; I'm glad to know that I have provided some.