Comparison Between Lux and Cycles

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lacilaci
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Re: Comparison Between Lux and Cycles

Post by lacilaci »

Here's my experience.

When I started working with blender I wanted to use corona as I was used to it... But addon was buggy and at one point I decided to give cycles a try since I've seen some nice renders from it.

So I tried it and I loved it and especially with 2.8 and eevee being capable of displaying the same shaders as cycles in viewport in realtime!!!

However as scenes grew in complexity and difficult light and shader interactions were happening the performance was dropping incredibly and something like interior rendering on cyles using cpu+gpu was far slower as cpu only on corona. I tried hard to make cycles work, but there are only shitty ao tricks that sometimes work but only in very limited scenarios. Aside poor gi performance it also seems cycles has hard time with glossy reflections and denoiser doesn't help too much in that regards. On top of that I've heard from many people that even decent gpus struggle with interior situations using cycles and that's still limiting you to scenes that fit VRAM.

At some point I saw Charles's render on blenderartists ,or maybe some random video suggestion on youtube(I really don't remember where) I knew about luxcore from before, I always remembered it as the slowest renderer on earth. But since I now used blender and there was blender addon, I gave it a try. And I really quickly learned that it is actually much faster in raw performance compared to cycles, especially with complex gi and scenes. Then I saw the feature poll on this forum filled with nice features and it is clear to me that this renderer is going to advance and evolve. Looking at the speed of development compared to how (today) cycles stagnates I have high hopes for this renderer to become as versatile as vray or corona, whereas cycles is reminding me more of arnold or renderman in terms of development focus.

comparisons are a bit difficult lux and cycles, cycles is pretty much feature complete but mostly relying on brute force everything into pathtracing as of now. Luxcore is far from feature complete renderer yet but fast already and even utilizes clever ideas to boost performance which is crucial for freelancers and small to medium sized studios.

both renderers are opensource so the potential is unlimited however cycles/blender devs seem to be very careful when it comes to experimental and new features and I guess currently 2.8 is in focus much more than cycles on its own (I guess this is why something like e-cycles exists - commercial version of cycles with some performance tweaks)

luxcore devs are on other hand open to suggestions and willing to explore ideas to push luxcore development. But userbase is very small just as the amount of developers, so things are taking shape slowly.

I wouldn't look for ultimate renderer in open source and in fact I wouldn't look for ultimate renderer in commercial software. If you compare arnold to corona, or vray and renderman... There are case to case situations that favor one over another. And then there is user skill, you can find an ultra realistic render from over 10 years back using mental ray and you can find a completely crappy render from maxwell renderer or corona.

Use tools you're comfortable with and if you see a comparison between renderers(or other software) ask yourself if that situation that favors one over another applies to you and your work.
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