This, my friend is what I'm always talking about. It is a bit sad truth but I too face it every day.FarbigeWelt wrote: ↑Wed Nov 28, 2018 10:52 am I would probably think differently if I had to use CGI as a professional but then customers would pay for what they ask, namely time, time and sometimes quality. Lot of advertisings based on CGI look average or less compared to what is possible with LuxCore. It just a personal opinion.
"Make it look good and have it done fast!" is coming from every client everywhere, and they do not care about your fancy ultimate and superior algorithms, in the end it simply has to look convincing enough for the client, for me, this means a flexible and easy to use renderer always wins the race and fair comparisons don't matter!
And now, if luxcore dev's do it out of passion and don't care what "market" wants and have their own vision it is all good. But results from "the market" will reflect that.
Here's what my simple mind thinks need to happen with luxcore before it can even properly start to compete with "popular" products (Popular: not better or worse or free or expensive, but popular choice)
1.Clean the mess up. No place for features and modes that break feature parity and only serve very few spectrum of uses.
It's a sacrifice but I do think eventually this will inevitably happen...
get rid of:
bidir - a slow "nope" on cpu which if user enables by mistake and then sees what's going on, next thing he looks for is uninstall button.(of course I'm exagerating this a bit )
metropolis - works only good on cpu and really worth it only in the very isolated cases also combined with bidir.. omg just no...
random sampler - only useful for another useless feature(bcd)
bcd - needs replacement, you're wasting your time with this (I'm gonna visit a witchdoctor and sacrifice some animals to make you drop this)
tiled - should be gone or a simple tickbox with no additional settings for cases when running out of vram(but ideally focus on other mem optimization)
light strategy - log power only and a checkbox for DLCS(which should be disabled/hidden until bugs are solved)
clamp - should affect only secondary bounces I can't imagine reason to clamp direct light(but of course this might need some testing)
..Ok so what are we left with now is pathtracing doable on cpu+gpu or either, no setup needed. New user comes hits render and watch the magic happen, professionals can get right to work
(nobody cares about fiddling with settings unless it's a simple slider or checkbox that magicaly solves your optimization problem or unless it's a per object property that allows both artistic and optimization purposes)
2. Fixing shading issues and discprepancies between cpu and gpu needs to take precedence.
One thing is having fakes and workarounds to boost performance when time is precious, but nobody wants to do workarounds cause shader parameter or a bug breaks how rendering result looks, that's a big no no.
3. By this point(after step 1 and 2 is done) luxcore is usable for many many cases even by idiots, also easy to use not prone to user error and not requiring people to do acrobatics with their scene setup.
So we can talk new features now. How?
Clear roadmap that not only shows what is planned but in what order... (I believe it helped corona a lot to have always a clear statement and list (trello - although usually very short list) for every release, because userbase always knows what is the direction and keeps coming back for daily builds)
As for money, I couldn't even navigate through how bounties work. I find it hard to believe it is an effective way of doing funding. Make it easy to fund you through your own website with a big donate button and give a result of how many ppl donated or donate per month (maybe even give an optimal monthly target you want to achieve) and drop every other option so that it is again plain and simple(unless it is actually working for you now, which I couldn't even find out because I'm too stupid)
And before you call me ungrateful and always complaining. I spent over 30min. of my valuable time writing this "list" up not cause I'm ungrateful or decided to piss someone off. But because there is a lot of good things about this project, it is handled by proffesionals, but it is not handled as a product for mass market, so it might always face the same issues over and over again (1.users that don't know how to use it, 2.users that can't rely on it, 3.users that don't find it proffesional due to inconsistencies and lack of flexibility)
Who knows, do you? I might be wrong...