What's new in Portable LuxRender 1.5.1
May 5, 2016
- Build system improvements
- Adaptations to LuxRays
New in Portable LuxRender 1.4 (Feb 18, 2015)
- LuxCore:
- new biased path tracing renderer to allow for fast and noise free, but less accurate, renderings, it is available in both CPU and OpenCL flavours with a special realtime mode (Dade can you make a list of current features, tuning knobs, and what's supported in LuxBlend? There is a thread about it, but not sure it is up to date: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=10529)
- Arbitrary Output Values support enabling output of Z buffer, position, material, normal, ... data (Dade, is there a full list? Is it fully supported in LuxBlend?)
- support for light groups
- direct visibility flag to hide objects in direct sight
- full C++ and Python bindings for the API (we should definitely write documentation for that)
- object, camera, materials, ... editing within the API to update the scene on the fly
- fixed mattetranslucent material
- the code is now Apache Public License v2
- new telnet interface
- port of blender procedural textures
- new lxs parser for backward compatibility with LuxRender
- support for quads in mesh definitions (they are split into triangles)
- support for LuxRender tonemappers (autolinear, linear
- point light support with IES support
- IES support to area light source
- support for spot light source
- support for projection light source
- support for constant infinite light source (without image map)
- support for distant light source
- support for velvet material
- support for sky2 light source
- improved VCM bidir implementation
- replaced FreeImage library with OpenImageIO
- support for cloth material
- support for carpaint material
- improved bump and normal mapping to match LuxRender output
- support for area light with null material
- support for volume absorption and scattering (single or multiple)
- support for clear, homogeneous and heterogeneous volumes
- support for volume precedence (to make it easier to work with liquids for example)
- support for arbitrary camera clipping planes
- support for volume emission (with light group support)
- support for gaussian pixel filter
- support for laser light
- support for Blackman-Harris pixel filter
- support for camera response
- support for rough matte material (Oren-Nayar model)
- support for camera autofocus
- support for rough matte translucent material
- support for motion blur (camera, lights, objects, but no deformation yet)
- pixel filters can now have arbitrary sizes
- fix bump map rendering with missing UV information
- area light fixes regarding the use of power and efficiency
- fix lxs parsing issues
- add support for imagemap channel selection
- improved reinhard tonemapper
- fix some light group issues
- fix a bug in shadow masks output and provide accelerated functions for AOV output
- fix light source update issues
- fix glossy2 issues when using absorption and multibounce
- fix metal2 behaviour when using custom colour
- add full update support to RT(BIAS)PATHOCL
- fix editing of lights
- fix editing of materials
- fix editing of textures
- mix material can now emit light
- fix exporting of glass properties
- fix metal2 material
- clamp is now disabled by default in biaspath
- support for glossytranslucent
- the lxs parser now supports more materials
- LuxRender:
- update of LuxCore renderer (biaspath support, new light types, new materials, new textures, volumes, new pixel filters, bias path halt condition, light strategies, motion blur)
- fix hair mesh normals
- new interface to render on MS Azure
- FreeImage replaced by OpenImageIO
- antialiasing of the render view
- add autofocus support when using LuxCore
- add imagemap channel selection support when using LuxCore
- improved reinhard tonemapper
- fix an issue with chromatic aberration post processing
- fix an issue with imagemap handling with LuxCore
- fix some bugs in LuxCore renderer handling of lights
- export glossytranslucent to LuxCore renderer
- change chromatic aberration lens effect slider range to something more reasonable
- LuxBlend:
- improved hair and particles export
- various fixes to the nodes system
- update LuxCore rendering modes
- default pixel filter is now Blackman-Harris
- render to viewport when using LuxCore
- direct volume data access for Blender >2.71 (faster)
- support for LuxCore specific material settings
- support for LuxCore materials, emission, bump and normal maps
- add the ability to configure min/max epsilon in engine settings
- fix texture preview with upcoming versions of Blender
- fix multithreading issues
- add shinymetal material to nodes editor
- increase limits of UV scale and offset settings
- improved resolution rounding (closer to Blender behaviour)
- add support for LuxCore AOV (arbitrary output values)
- add support for various Blender image types (file, generated, sequence)
- improved texture multiply
- fix LuxCore normalmap export
- fix issues with some texture trees using LuxCore
- add support for more textures when using LuxCore (dots, checkerboard, fbm, band, wrinkled, windy, add, uv, constant)
- fix particles export
- PEP8 conformance
- improved Blender statistics when using LuxCore
- much improved but still experimental realtime preview
- support of sun, sky and distant lights with LuxCore
- fix DOF support with LuxCore
- light groups support with LuxCore
- fix border rendering with LuxCore
- support for spot lights
- it is now possible to abort an export process
- AOVs support improvements
- fix hemi light orientation
- fix point light orientation (for IES which is now supported with LuxCore)
- support for projector lights with LuxCore
- tonemapping settings for LuxCore
- fix gamma of final render
- allow tuning of LuxCore rendering modes
- glass2 material support with LuxCore
- volume support with LuxCore
- volume precedence support with LuxCore
- lots of small bug fixes and improvements
New in Portable LuxRender 1.4 RC 2 (Nov 17, 2014)
- LuxCore new features:
- fix bump map rendering with missing UV information
- area light fixes regarding the use of power and efficiency
- fix lxs parsing issues
- add support for imagemap channel selection
- improved reinhard tonemapper
- fix some light group issues
- fix a bug in shadow masks output and provide accelerated functions for AOV output
- fix light source update issues
- fix glossy2 issues when using absorption and multibounce
- fix metal2 behaviour when using custom colour
- add full update support to RT(BIAS)PATHOCL
- LuxRender new features:
- add autofocus support when using LuxCore
- add imagemap channel selection support when using LuxCore
- improved reinhard tonemapper
- fix an issue with chromatic aberration post processing
- fix an issue with imagemap handling with LuxCore
- LuxBlend new features:
- add the ability to configure min/max epsilon in engine settings
- fix texture preview with upcoming versions of Blender
- fix multithreading issues
- add shinymetal material to nodes editor
- increase limits of UV scale and offset settings
- improved resolution rounding (closer to Blender behaviour)
- add support for LuxCore AOV (arbitrary output values)
- add support for various Blender image types (file, generated, sequence)
- improved texture multiply
- fix LuxCore normalmap export
- fix issues with some texture trees using LuxCore
- add support for more textures when using LuxCore (dots, checkerboard, fbm, band, wrinkled, windy, add, uv, constant)
New in Portable LuxRender 1.3.1 (Apr 30, 2014)
- fixes for latest OSX versions UI updates
- fix bloom filter used in an animation (the configuration of filters in the scene files was a new feature of v1.3)
- fix an issue with camera response
- improvement to the OpenCL version of the QBVH accelerator
- fix carpaint material node in LuxBlend
- fix export of glare maps parameters
New in Portable LuxRender 1.3 (Apr 30, 2014)
- Improved support for Strands (hair).
- Support for vertex colors and alpha.
- Improved lower bound on glossy roughness (0.000001 vs old limit of 0.006), can be made mirror-like now.
- Better out-of-gamut color clamping.
- New "darken" color clamping mode.
- New "abbe" fresnel texture for specifying IOR using Abbe numbers.
- New false color tonemapper.
- New obstacle-map based glare, much faster and much better looking.
- New "heterogeneous" volume type (for smoke etc), along with 3d textures "cloud", "exponential" and "densitygrid".
- New "autopowerimp" light strategy.
- New Catmull-Rom and Blackman-Harris pixel filters.
- New renderer "slgrenderer", which integrates the SLG rendering engine in LuxRender (not interactive though).
- LuxRender now also has "sobol" sampler, faster alternative to the "lowdiscrepancy" sampler.
- Arealights can now be instanced, this allows for motion blurred lights.
- Support for deferred loading of meshes.
- LuxRender executable location has moved to addon preference panel, see Blender Addon page in user preferences.
- Support for node editor!!! Note this is still under development, which may later render your node materials invalid, so use for testing/playing only at this time please.
- support for bump and normal maps when using the mix material and the SLG renderer
- fix for the MQBVH accelerator in SLG when all primitives have the same bounding box
- improved preview in Blender (faster and more accurate)
- fix normal generation for loop subdivided meshes and make loopsubdivision more robust (it should no longer hang nor crash)
- make the IES parser accept more valid IES files
- properly compute sky power so that it can be used with importance light sampling strategies
New in Portable LuxRender 1.2.1 (Mar 19, 2013)
- incorrect rendering of architectural glass with bidirectional path tracing
- broken motion blur export with Blender 2.66
- imaging pipeline inconsistencies with Blender 2.66
New in Portable LuxRender 1.2 (Feb 26, 2013)
- fix a memory leak in the GUI
- fix display of .flm statistics
- fix rendering artefacts when the scene is very small
- fix for incorrect rendering of environment lights with large black areas
- fix for severe regression introduced in bidirectional rendering when optimizing dispersion code
- fix a long standing bug in bidirectional which made renders with bidirectional appear darker than with path
- fix lots of issues with hybrid path rendering, it should now match normal path rendering
- fix wavelength mutation in metropolis
- fix for image filters having a width less than 0.5
- removed the annoying message box when loading a queue file
- fix display of negative numbers in statistics
- lots of fixes for SLG3
- hybrid rendering modes are now available even on non OpenCL builds
- SLG bidirectional implementation with vertex merging or hybrid mode
- fixes to SLG sun light
- fixes to bounding boxes causing instances objects to sometime disappear or be clipped
- tile rendering with SLG
- more advanced GPU memory management with SLG
- SLG core is now a library
- port of some more Lux features to SLG core
- user driven sampling and noise aware sampling (still experimental with bidir and metropolis combination)
- all scenes rendered are now added to the queue so you don't have to choose between single render and batch rendering
- improved queue handling
- fix dispersion using SPPM rendering
- new woven cloth material
- WARNING: backward compatibility break: the displacement direction when using loop subdivision has been reversed to match general expectations and to be consistent with microdisplacement or bump mapping
- improved dispersion handling with path and bidir
- much faster bloom filter
- fix a memory leak that could be dramatic when using hybrid rendering
- fix for projector light not applying transforms correctly
New in Portable LuxRender 1.1 (Oct 9, 2012)
- huge speed up with CPU rendering (measured from 10 to 40% improvement, mostly noticeable when using instances)
- new sky2 light using Hosek and Wilkie just released model
- render queue fixes when using network rendering
- fix haltspp when using SPPM
- new nsamples parameter to the distant light to match other lights and be adjustable with advanced light sampling schemes
- don't add an extra extension when saving jpeg or tiff files
- fix light groups LDR saving
- use a new cache directory in the user temp directory for network rendering to prevent denied accesses when downloading files
- prevent out of bound interpolation with the mix material
- network rendering fixes
- fix area lights consisting of several 100000 faces
- updated luxrays to support more LuxRender features in core
- architectural glass fix in SLG
- render noise threshold halt condition in SLG
- various fixes and improvements
New in Portable LuxRender 1.0 RC3 (Aug 1, 2012)
- GUI supports loading "queue files" (.lxq) directly, they're simple text files with one lxs filename per line which are added to the rendering queue.
- Fixed issue with slow network transfers, as well as several other network fixes.
- Added alpha channel support in GUI, toggle it in the View menu.
- The theads, haltspp and halttime spinboxes in the GUI no longer updates the value during typing, only when enter is pressed.
- Tweaks to rendering statistics.
- Added "add" and "subtract" textures, these perform simple addition and subtraction respectively.
- Progress bar in GUI now shows the rendering progress if a halt condition is set.
- Added an initial "cooldown" to metropolis sampler, this avoids bias when using large mutation probabilities different than 0.5. This is turned on by default.
- Added experimental "adaptive" large mutation probability feature to metropolis sampler, which can be used to find the "optimal" large mutation probability for a scene.
- Various fixes and improvements