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Strengths [Weaknesses]

Farm-Supported

Luxrender is a well-known renderer and some commercial render farms officially support it, so you can submit jobs and have Luxrender work for you in the “cloud”.

OpenCL

Luxrender takes full advantage of OpenCL and CUDA toolkits, so it can use every last available resource to get your renders out as quickly as possible.

Industry-Grade

Luxrender features professional-grade features, including lighting groups, volumetrics, instancing, motion blur, depth of field, tone mapping, de-noising, and much more. This is a serious renderer.

Weaknesses [Strengths]

Big

Luxrender is a serious, professional renderer. If you're just learning how to model or light, it might be overkill as an initial rendering setup.

OpenCL/CUDA

Many of Luxrender's most advanced features expect you to have a powerful computer with a powerful GPU.

Install

Installing Luxrender broadly requires, like other renderers, the installation of the Luxrender base package, and then the plugin that will make it useful in your application of choice (probably blender).

To get the basic Luxrender package installed, first install its dependencies; all of them are available from http://slackbuilds.org but some (like OpenCL) are optional.

Once the dependencies are installed, install Luxrender from http://slackbuilds.org. This also installs the Blender package.

To compile without OpenCL support:

$ OPENCL=no ./luxrender.SlackBuild

or

$ OPENCL=no sport i luxrender

If you do not know what OpenCL is, you probably do not need it. If you do know what it is and want to use it, then you must follow the instructions in the OpenCL SlackBuild to ensure that OpenCL is enabled on your system.

Usage

LuxRender has several entry points. It can be launched as a shell application:

$ luxconsole /path/to/file.lxs

It has a stand-alone GUI frontend, which you can launch from the K Menu or from a shell:

$ luxrender&

luxrender.jpg

And finally, the Blender plugin, which can be activated and used the same as any other Blender plugin:

  • Activate the Blender plugin in the User Preferences panel → Render. (There is no need to install the plugin as you might other Blender addons, because the LuxRender installer from SlackBuilds has already installed it for you.)
  • Make it your active renderer in the Info panel

luxblend.jpg

See Also
blender
mitsuba
povray