{"id":494,"date":"2013-12-20T20:34:08","date_gmt":"2013-12-21T01:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/?p=494"},"modified":"2014-06-04T14:16:11","modified_gmt":"2014-06-04T18:16:11","slug":"full-rendered-splendor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/full-rendered-splendor\/","title":{"rendered":"Full rendered splendor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After another couple of days messing about, I finally understand a few more things about LuxRender.<\/p>\n<p>1.) You can&#8217;t make a LightSource of type &#8220;area&#8221;. Despite the fact that this is (ahem) nowhere in the documentation, you have to use AreaLightSource. The AreaLightSource seems to be a LOT less powerful than a &#8220;direct&#8221; light source, requiring changes in gain on the order to thousands to see them both in the same scene. This may be because the &#8220;direct&#8221; light is taken to be something like sunlight?<\/p>\n<p>2.) LuxRender reliably crashes at the end of each and every render if you use hybrid (CPU\/GPU) mode. I&#8217;m not sure whether this is because it&#8217;s insisting on picking up the Intel Iris GPU on my MacBook as well as the NVIDIA card, but I can&#8217;t seem to find a way to lock out the IrisPro.<\/p>\n<p>3.) Despite the face that &#8220;sphere&#8221; primitives are described as unsupported in the hybrid renderer, they actually seem to work just fine in 1.3.1 (although they do throw a warning, this may just mean that the CPU has to get involved?).<\/p>\n<p>4.) Texture mapping meshes depends on you providing explicit uv coordinates for the vertices. In these coordinates, the dimensions of the texture image seem to be [0,1] x [0,1], regardless of the pixel dimensions of the image.<\/p>\n<p>5.) Although per-vertex normals are described as &#8220;optional&#8221; in the mesh documentation, and a mesh I built by hand worked fine without them, a PLY mesh without vertex normals doesn&#8217;t seem to render at all.<\/p>\n<p>After all this, I finally managed to make the example I was looking for, which will be part of the MATH 4510\/6510 class next semester. It&#8217;s a collection of 750 spheres distributed normally in space with a collection of 70 spheres distributed according to a scaled normal which are all glowing.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/core_melt.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-495\" src=\"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/core_melt-300x300.png\" alt=\"core_melt\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/coremelt_final.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-497\" src=\"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/coremelt_final-300x300.png\" alt=\"coremelt_final\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/coremelt_final-300x300.png 300w, https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/coremelt_final-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/coremelt_final.png 800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The resulting image is kind of sleek and dramatic and wonderful, I think. I found that the noise in the image was pretty much gone at 500 S\/p. (This is an 800&#215;800 render, and I got to that point in about 10 minutes on the left.) The one on the right has a good deal more light, and required half an hour or so to get to that point. The image shown is at something closer to 800 S\/p, and required some manual balancing of the light sources to look right.) I was more than prepared to continue all night, but it doesn&#8217;t seem needed.<\/p>\n<p>My book on Unity arrived today, so that seems like a natural time to switch gears and plunge into my next tech project: writing the 2.0 version of TaylorTurret!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After another couple of days messing about, I finally understand a few more things about LuxRender. 1.) You can&#8217;t make a LightSource of type &#8220;area&#8221;. Despite the fact that this is (ahem) nowhere in the documentation, you have to use AreaLightSource. The AreaLightSource seems to be a LOT less powerful than a &#8220;direct&#8221; light source, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":673,"href":"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions\/673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasoncantarella.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}