Real-time material preview?

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BobDotProduct
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Real-time material preview?

Post by BobDotProduct »

New to LuxCoreRender, so please be gentle. Is the rendered material preview in the Material Properties tab of Blender the only way to see a preview of the material I'm editing? This makes minor adjustments fairly time-consuming. Am I just not ticking a box somewhere to be able to see the material in the Material Preview 3d viewport shading mode?
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Dade
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Re: Real-time material preview?

Post by Dade »

BobDotProduct wrote: Fri Feb 07, 2020 7:00 pm New to LuxCoreRender, so please be gentle. Is the rendered material preview in the Material Properties tab of Blender the only way to see a preview of the material I'm editing? This makes minor adjustments fairly time-consuming. Am I just not ticking a box somewhere to be able to see the material in the Material Preview 3d viewport shading mode?
Can't you just enable view port rendering and see there any change you make :?:
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BobDotProduct
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Re: Real-time material preview?

Post by BobDotProduct »

Yes I can, but my question was specifically about working with textures. If I'm creating even a moderately complex procedural texture, I'll be working on multiple small parts, making lots of changes repeatedly. Waiting for the noise to render away enough so that I can see what effect my changes had on my texture is very slow. I'm honestly surprised no one has brought this up before. Creating textures in Cycles or Eevee gives you almost instantaneous feedback in the Material Preview shading mode.
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Dade
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Re: Real-time material preview?

Post by Dade »

BobDotProduct wrote: Sun Feb 09, 2020 3:37 am Yes I can, but my question was specifically about working with textures. If I'm creating even a moderately complex procedural texture, I'll be working on multiple small parts, making lots of changes repeatedly. Waiting for the noise to render away enough so that I can see what effect my changes had on my texture is very slow. I'm honestly surprised no one has brought this up before. Creating textures in Cycles or Eevee gives you almost instantaneous feedback in the Material Preview shading mode.
I don't use Blender so I have only a vague idea of your problem and B.Y.O.B. is the one can help you but are you using OpenCL for preview ? Because OpenCL kernel compilation time may be the source of your problem ?
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sarmath
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Re: Real-time material preview?

Post by sarmath »

When you switch to Luxcore in Blender, material preview mode is not working at all. You can use only render preview witch is heavy. I am also hoping that will be changed asap.
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Luxcore material preview
Luxcore material preview
Luxcore Rendering preview
Luxcore Rendering preview
Cycles material preview
Cycles material preview
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B.Y.O.B.
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Re: Real-time material preview?

Post by B.Y.O.B. »

Dade wrote: Sun Feb 09, 2020 1:18 pm I don't use Blender so I have only a vague idea of your problem and B.Y.O.B. is the one can help you but are you using OpenCL for preview ?
Blender's "Material" shading mode is a simple OpenGL rendering of the scene with GLSL material shaders, mostly for texture preview (imagemaps and procedural textures are supported, as well as all Eevee and Cycles shader nodes).

Unfortunately Blender offers no API for external renderengines to supply their own GLSL code per node for such a material preview.
See https://devtalk.blender.org/t/lookdev-f ... gines/7722

We could implement a special OpenGL renderengine in Luxcore to circumvent this, but it would require quite some work and would add another level of code duplication (in addition to C++ and OpenCL shader code, we would also have GLSL shader code). So I doubt this will happen anytime soon.
sarmath
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Re: Real-time material preview?

Post by sarmath »

By the way its working partialy for image textures when you setup cycles material first. Then you can see textures in this mode also in Luxcore if you add the same image map to Luxcore material.
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B.Y.O.B.
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Re: Real-time material preview?

Post by B.Y.O.B. »

sarmath wrote: Sun Feb 09, 2020 3:24 pm By the way its working partialy for image textures when you setup cycles material first. Then you can see textures in this mode also in Luxcore if you add the same image map to Luxcore material.
Cycles/Eevee nodes are used when entering material preview, even when the engine is LuxCore.
If you only need simple node setups, you can try to enable "use cycles nodes" in the material and work with Cycles nodes.
BobDotProduct
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Re: Real-time material preview?

Post by BobDotProduct »

Thanks for the replies. It's unfortunate but I'll figure something out. LuxCore renders are too beautiful to let something like this keep me from using it.
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