LuX Render
by admin
LuxRender - Free Unbiased 3D Rendering Engine
It is an open source physically correct, unbiased rendering engine developed on the basis of PBRT; an outstanding research project and book by Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys. LuxRender is totaly Physically Based Render; which means, unlike other popular 3D rendering systems, LuxRender doesn’t use tricks to imitate real world behavior : all calculations are done according mathematical models based on the real word. Physically based Unbiased rendering engines offers advantage of very realistic images but at the cost of time; slow due to heavy calculations. Rendering with LuxRender means simulating light according to physical equations, this produces realistic photographic quality images. LuxRender comprises an interactive GUI, a command line tool, and Blender 3D exporter Plugins (LuxBlend). The Lux Source code is also available freely to developer for future integration of LuxRender into third-party applications. LuxRender runs on GNU/Linux, Microsoft’s-Windows(R) and MacOS X(R) platforms.
Some of noticeable features of LuxRender are listed below:
- Multithreading for multi-core or SMP systems
- Compact RIB-like file format which implements the complete API. (.lxs extention)
- Blender 3D exporter Plugins (LuxBlend)
- Physically based Lightsources: area, sunsky, infinite, distant, spot, goniometric , projection etc.
- Perspective Camera: Supports true DOF (depth of field)
- Materials & Textures: Inculdes BRDFs, PBRT, Image textures, HDRI, Procedural Textures etc.
- Film/Texture Imaging Pipeline : Colour handling, OpenEXR RGBA, Tonemapping, filters, Pixel Sample Reconstruction Filters, Gamma correction etc.
- Real-time engine control with Adding & Removing of rendering threads
- Path Tracing, Bidirectional Path Tracing, final gathering, Instant “Global Illumination”
….these are only some of the features in luxRender, a full features list is available on their website. Interested 3d user can freely download both LuxRender and LuxBlend - Blender 3D exporter Plugins. Blender 2.4 + LuxRender tutorials are also available along with a reference manual.
Download links:-
MS-Windows(R)
win32 - SSE2 (Intel Pentium4 and up / ADM Athlon and up) version
http://www.luxrender2.org/downloads/LuxRender_v0.1rc2_win32_sse2.zip
win32 - SSE1 compatibility version (download this release for older CPU’s with SSE support)
http://www.luxrender2.org/downloads/LuxRender_v0.1rc2_win32_sse.zip
notes: If the engine does’nt start and gives an ‘illegal instruction’ error,
try using the SSE1 compatibility version.
GNU/Linux
Static binary (32bits), compiled on Fedora Core7 (should work on most 32bit linux distributions) (RECOMMENDED)
http://www.luxrender2.org/downloads/LuxRender_v0.1rc2_fc7-static.tar.bz2
Static binary (x64), compiled on Fedora Core7 (should work on most x64 linux distributions) (RECOMMENDED for x64)
http://www.luxrender2.org/downloads/LuxRender_v0.1rc2_fc7-x64-static.tar.bz2
Fedora Core 7 - x64 architecture (dynamically linked) (not recommended due to the installation of depencencies needed)
http://www.luxrender2.org/downloads/LuxRender_v0.1rc2_fc7-x64.tar.bz2
Mac OS X(R)
Neo has provided us with a fresh RC2 Mac OS X(R) intel package.
This package includes all dependencies, as well as an icon to launch the application.
http://www.luxrender2.org/downloads/LuxRender_v0.1rc2_osxintel.mpkg.zip
(NOTE: this package is dynamically linked and may require development experience to get it to work. an easy to use Mac OS X(R) package will be provided for the RC3 release, soon.)
Test Scenes
current testscene package:
http://www.luxrender2.org/downloads/rc2_testscenes.zip
