Thoughts from Joe on Lux and Indigo renderers

[Joe Crawford]

I wanted to pitched in regarding the Lux renderer that is being
discussed, and the non-free Indigo renderer.

A while back I had actually inquired about whether Indigo would be
open sourced.  The author told me he would be looking for a very large
sum of money, which I didn't think the community would likely be able
to drum up.

I pretty much put Indigo to the wayside, since I was pretty sure it
would not become Free Software. As far as commercial software goes,
Indigo has nothing on the quality of Maxwell Render anyway, so the
only reason I would have kept using it is if it had been open sourced.

Since then however, I discovered Lux, and, I've used it quite a bit
now. It has gone really smoothly. I've also been reading the
developers blogs etc and its definitely seeing lots of active
development.  According to one of the main developers, he/they are
actually getting paid to add features for certain commercial
productions that are using it.

I think its a very promising renderer.  It has a lot of active
development, and is already very useful.  I've used it a fair amount.
It renders over the network add gives great results pretty easily.

Its been made to work with Blender through a python script, which
really isn't all that complicated.  It just has to understand all the
available material, lighting and rendering options. I think for
geometry it just spits out polygons for Lux.

Lux has also proven useful to teach students about realistic
rendering, and since its free, I can give the students the software
they need to learn with!

So....    Go Lux!  I'm really happy that some free software has come
in to fill that high end rendering void.


Sincerely,

Joe Crawford
___________________________________
Owner - Celestine Studios   and   Joetainment Enterprises
Cell: 604-866-3050
Email: joetainment@...
Web: http://celestinestudios.com

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[Timothy M. Shead]

Joe Crawford wrote:

> I wanted to pitched in regarding the Lux renderer that is being
> discussed, and the non-free Indigo renderer.
>
> I think its a very promising renderer.  It has a lot of active
> development, and is already very useful.  I've used it a fair amount.
> It renders over the network add gives great results pretty easily.
>
> Its been made to work with Blender through a python script, which
> really isn't all that complicated.  It just has to understand all the
> available material, lighting and rendering options. I think for
> geometry it just spits out polygons for Lux.
>
> Lux has also proven useful to teach students about realistic
> rendering, and since its free, I can give the students the software
> they need to learn with!
>
> So....    Go Lux!  I'm really happy that some free software has come
> in to fill that high end rendering void.

As it happens, Daniel and I were already getting to a decision-point
with Indigo ... in-general, I found the documentation on materials to be
pretty lousy, and it wasn't clear how to "map" the Indigo materials into
the K-3D pipeline.  So, with a little arm-twisting, Daniel agreed to
look at LuxRender.  I'm just starting a new LuxRender module, so in a
couple of days we should be up-and-running.

Cheers,
Tim

[tshead.vcf]

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[Daniel Scott Matthews]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 2:25 PM, Timothy M. Shead<tshead@...> wrote:

> Joe Crawford wrote:
>> I wanted to pitched in regarding the Lux renderer that is being
>> discussed, and the non-free Indigo renderer.
>>
>> I think its a very promising renderer.  It has a lot of active
>> development, and is already very useful.  I've used it a fair amount.
>> It renders over the network add gives great results pretty easily.
>>
>> Its been made to work with Blender through a python script, which
>> really isn't all that complicated.  It just has to understand all the
>> available material, lighting and rendering options. I think for
>> geometry it just spits out polygons for Lux.
>>
>> Lux has also proven useful to teach students about realistic
>> rendering, and since its free, I can give the students the software
>> they need to learn with!
>>
>> So....    Go Lux!  I'm really happy that some free software has come
>> in to fill that high end rendering void.
>
> As it happens, Daniel and I were already getting to a decision-point
> with Indigo ... in-general, I found the documentation on materials to be
> pretty lousy, and it wasn't clear how to "map" the Indigo materials into
> the K-3D pipeline.  So, with a little arm-twisting, Daniel agreed to
> look at LuxRender.  I'm just starting a new LuxRender module, so in a
> couple of days we should be up-and-running.
>

Yup, Indigo rocks, but LuxRender rocks the free world. :-)

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