Feature suggestion for future updates of LuxCore
Posted: Thu Aug 06, 2020 7:25 pm
I actually for some reason cannot verify my account on Bounty so I am just going to post here for now, but as a look developer I have a suggestion for something I have not really seen in a whole lot of consumer engines and I think it would be a great addition to lux.
It would be really cool to have a lighting mode override.
I know overrides already exist, but they are limited to a single material that you have to pick yourself. Common practice from my own experience is to not use 1 but 3 materials, your metals and mirrors stay metals and mirrors because you want to see what the specular highlights look like in reflections, your glass stays glass because you want to see how light will pass through the objects and how lit objects behind the glass will appear.
It would be cool to have a button in the overrides for "lighting mode". Basically it could be just a button, with checkbox for "disable specular," just in case you do not need glass or metals or need to conserve computing power due to scene limitations.
The general idea as the way I would love to see it would work as follows:
1. The material ouput node on any material has a new input for "Lighting Mode Override" where you can attatch an alternate node tree which will be used in place of your primary node tree, only while lighting mode is active. If the input is left blank then the material defaults to 50% grey matte material. This way if you want your window to stay glass while in lighting mode you could plug a glass material into the override input which ommits dispersion and roughness as a lighter weight alternative, only while lighting.
2. Caustics is disabled while lighting mode is active.
3. The number of all bounces is set to 4 as there is really no need for more than this just to calculate your lighting. Although, I would not be mad if there was an option to set a custom number of bounces for while the override is active, in case there is ever an instance to use more or less than 4, but I think it would be rare to need more or less than that for setting up lighting.
I know this is one of those "low priority" type suggestions but having gone from tools that let me do this back to the standard rendering work flow, it's like, there's no going back, except I did, and I really miss it. Material overriddes are helpful for this as is but the inability to override some materials and not others is somewhat difficult in certain scenes.
Thank you so much if you got through the whole suggestion, and I know the community on here is small and doesn't necesarily represent the over all userbase but if anyone here likes the idea I would love for anyone who agrees just to throw a comment on here so we can see how many people would also like to see something like this added as a future feature.
It would be really cool to have a lighting mode override.
I know overrides already exist, but they are limited to a single material that you have to pick yourself. Common practice from my own experience is to not use 1 but 3 materials, your metals and mirrors stay metals and mirrors because you want to see what the specular highlights look like in reflections, your glass stays glass because you want to see how light will pass through the objects and how lit objects behind the glass will appear.
It would be cool to have a button in the overrides for "lighting mode". Basically it could be just a button, with checkbox for "disable specular," just in case you do not need glass or metals or need to conserve computing power due to scene limitations.
The general idea as the way I would love to see it would work as follows:
1. The material ouput node on any material has a new input for "Lighting Mode Override" where you can attatch an alternate node tree which will be used in place of your primary node tree, only while lighting mode is active. If the input is left blank then the material defaults to 50% grey matte material. This way if you want your window to stay glass while in lighting mode you could plug a glass material into the override input which ommits dispersion and roughness as a lighter weight alternative, only while lighting.
2. Caustics is disabled while lighting mode is active.
3. The number of all bounces is set to 4 as there is really no need for more than this just to calculate your lighting. Although, I would not be mad if there was an option to set a custom number of bounces for while the override is active, in case there is ever an instance to use more or less than 4, but I think it would be rare to need more or less than that for setting up lighting.
I know this is one of those "low priority" type suggestions but having gone from tools that let me do this back to the standard rendering work flow, it's like, there's no going back, except I did, and I really miss it. Material overriddes are helpful for this as is but the inability to override some materials and not others is somewhat difficult in certain scenes.
Thank you so much if you got through the whole suggestion, and I know the community on here is small and doesn't necesarily represent the over all userbase but if anyone here likes the idea I would love for anyone who agrees just to throw a comment on here so we can see how many people would also like to see something like this added as a future feature.