Fund to accelerate Development

Discussion related to the LuxCore functionality, implementations and API.
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Sharlybg
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Fund to accelerate Development

Post by Sharlybg »

I've an idea i want to share with you.Here is a quick luxcore project overview After a year :

---- The engine is in a beta stage with a good stability and fonctionnality meaning we are near to an official version release.

---- About Development team we still have only :

1 Core developer
1 Addon Developer
3 additional developers ( 2 new guys join the Dev team)

---- After vote here viewtopic.php?f=5&t=308 we come out with a kind of exicting roadmap.
Dade wrote: Thu May 10, 2018 9:36 am And the winner is...
  1. Light cache Part II: to accelerate indirect light sampling
  2. Light cache Part I: to accelerate direct light sampling in scenes with many light sources
  3. Walt Disney Principled Shader material
  4. Displacement (micro, vector, volume)
  5. Unbiased Photon Gathering for Light Transport Simulation and anditional photon mapping related techniques
  6. Terminator Artifact Treatment
  7. Support for a native hair primitive to accelerate hair/fur rendering
  8. Support for multiple UV sets for each mesh vertex
  9. New Glossy material with multiple scattering GGX, Irridescent microfacets, etc.
  10. Normals auto-smooth
  11. etc.

Here is the problem :

Now as you must notice many people inside and outside the project have they eyes locked to the project waiting for some features to be implemented. But for some obvious reason features like this are time consuming and require heavy ressources.

Due to the relative small size of the community and Development team size it's hard to have a normal ROADMAP with clear visibility of target and kind of deadline that you can see in big opensource project like Blender/Ubuntu ...
Developer are volunteer and they work on the project on they free time. they are normal human being like you with familly and real life problem. the meaning of this is that you can wait for feature most of the time longer than expected as it is a small opensource project with limited ressources.

The solution

Time is money = money can be also converted in time. Yes money ! there is no successfull opensource project without solid funds support (Blender is the best example)

https://fund.blender.org/
fund.jpg

THat said My idea is : crowdfunding.


We are arround 300 registered users. Sure all theses 300 are NOT active users. But if we can target something like 5$ -- 20$ /month / users with a global fund target of 10.000$/month (maybe 5000$/month ) and increase it as the project involve.

This is in my opinion a very feasable things with lot of advantage for users and Devs :


Users will have a fast develoment. faster renderer. ADD (artist driven development). for only a tiny $$ relative to what they put in hardware.really think that 60$ per years on a fast/robust/free renderer is better than 450$ on a new CPU/GPU to speed up a slow engine
.

What do you thinks ? CC are welcome !
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lacilaci
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Re: Fund to accelerate Development

Post by lacilaci »

Yeah, sure it could work. But this raises few questions:

1. If I already support other/similar project, blender/cycles for example, what does luxcore have to offer(different or better) for me to get interrested? (I see a lot of things that I like but also a lot of things I don't)

2. Renderer is not feature complete yet, and while it gets better at being user friendly there are a lot of concepts going on that make it look like a mess (in one setup, features work, then you change something and stuff either don't work or works differently.) There is a lot of inconsistencies and especially if the project is so small it makes one question, what takes precedence? (I still don't know who is this renderer for and if it's a good choice for me)
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Re: Fund to accelerate Development

Post by Sharlybg »

1/ You're not going to get indirect light cache ( + opencl accelerated ) in cycles or bidirectional engine anytime soon for example.

2/ yes it is a beta engine. and it is this kind of problem more donation are going to fix a bit faster.

You have very great Devs with good idea in mind. but too short team and time to work on the project this why i propose this idea.And on the other side let things are their are is not going to improve anything. And it could get worst as before when the project slowly dead. there is not too much good opensource renderer arround with enough strong ability to compete again industrie giant (like vray corona redshift).
I think with this engine project we have a better chance to bring something diferent on the table. the roadmap and idea are good. the Devs are really striking people.
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Sharlybg
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Re: Fund to accelerate Development

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When you see how the whole rendering industry is pusching like crazy for setting hyper high standars you can't sit down and just wait for other to change the world for you. Or we do it or there will be no reason for a professional to work with opensource external renderer in comming 5 years. Even realtime engine like lumion are getting closer.EEvee will be another groundbreaking things ( even for Archviz). It's becoming harder and harder for offline renderer to justify long rendering time (but with AI denoising RTX an caching vray/corona /octane/redshift are keeping themselves really safe and far enough )

Corona 3.0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAx9_EDyxCw
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FarbigeWelt
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Re: Fund to accelerate Development

Post by FarbigeWelt »

Nice product demonstration, I wonder what kind of hardware they used. However, the CGI businesses must be huge or how does Hollywood push all the superhero movies into the theaters with detailed multitextured highpoly objects moving more or less according to physics.
With the computing power of a small bitcoin miner‘s farm real time raytraycing should work flawlessly. Because of bitcoins falling exchange rate, the miner may need a new business model. Imagine a licence to compute. Available for just a few bucks and flatrates for a reasonable amount.
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Racleborg
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Re: Fund to accelerate Development

Post by Racleborg »

I think it's a wonderful project, and hope to be able to put in about the same next year as I did this year (despite having just been made redundant).

I know it's not a lot, but if things improve for me then I will be happy to put in a bit more.
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Re: Fund to accelerate Development

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FarbigeWelt wrote: Tue Nov 27, 2018 9:16 pm Nice product demonstration, I wonder what kind of hardware they used.
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lacilaci
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Re: Fund to accelerate Development

Post by lacilaci »

Sharlybg wrote: Tue Nov 27, 2018 11:53 am 1/ You're not going to get indirect light cache ( + opencl accelerated ) in cycles or bidirectional engine anytime soon for example.
There is none in luxcore too atm. Once it's done and actually works I would guess it can gain a lot of traction, so let's say I partially agree.
btw opencl accelerated cache? Last time I used corona it was seconds to compute cache without gpu...
Sharlybg wrote: Tue Nov 27, 2018 11:53 am 2/ yes it is a beta engine. and it is this kind of problem more donation are going to fix a bit faster.
This always brings me to another questions: there is only blender addon, so only blender users can support, blender users already have easy to use and flexible and feature complete render engine for free (and pls. don't start with bidir, the very same "insdustry giants" you mention: vray, corona... can handle things witohut it more than well with great commercial success.)
Sharlybg wrote: Tue Nov 27, 2018 11:53 am It's becoming harder and harder for offline renderer to justify long rendering time (but with AI denoising RTX an caching vray/corona /octane/redshift are keeping themselves really safe and far enough )
Yes denoising is a big and extremely important feature, and it's also the one feature in luxcore that makes me smash my head against the table everytime I try to use it. It's doing more damage than good for luxcore so far. Thankfully there might be compatible thirdparty addons that substitute the function at some point(but that's not luxcore related).

As for RTX I'm really thinking people expect wayyy to much from it. Some speedups for eevee, sure. Some speedup in simple scenes for cycles, ok... but I seriously doubt it's any sort of revolution happening right now. I actually hope I'm wrong here though.
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Sharlybg
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Re: Fund to accelerate Development

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There is none in luxcore too atm. Once it's done and actually works I would guess it can gain a lot of traction, so let's say I partially agree.
btw opencl accelerated cache? Last time I used corona it was seconds to compute cache without gpu
Why it should not happen Thomas where is your faith :D (" i'm not serious man :mrgreen: "). Opencl Acceleration is to tell you that secondary caching engine will also work on GPU like Dade said the gpu will be able to take precomputed light caching info to render faster just like CPU do but way faster.

This always brings me to another questions: there is only blender addon, so only blender users can support, blender users already have easy to use and flexible and feature complete render engine for free (and pls. don't start with bidir, the very same "insdustry giants" you mention: vray, corona... can handle things witohut it more than well with great commercial success.)

CYCLES is way far to be enought for everyone and i suppose for you too (reason why we talk about corona vray redshift all the time) if you want my opinion. Also everyone have different needs and standars cycles isn't build to fit all needs and any engine can do that. but we want to build something diferent and why not better for artist who want to have the choice (it can't simply deal with indirectly lit 3d scene like Luxcore also atm for example). if there is a better solution blender user will choose it and this is what we are trying to do. Blenderfoundation build Cycles with mainly animation studio and features film needs in mind (it is a good decision in my opinion) But you also need something to cover reamaining artist needs and this is why luxcore exists.
Octane is a good engine but many will go for redshift while some will stay on they octane. same for Maxwell vs indigo or Arion same for Corona vs Vray ...
Yes denoising is a big and extremely important feature, and it's also the one feature in luxcore that makes me smash my head against the table everytime I try to use it. It's doing more damage than good for luxcore so far. Thankfully there might be compatible thirdparty addons that substitute the function at some point(but that's not luxcore related).
Theses things will certainly be improved for sure. it is a 1years old engine with mainly two super guys writting the code without be paid for that (some will mention karba from fstorm but is Fstorm free ). And to my point of view theses guys need more support this all want people to simply understand.
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FarbigeWelt
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Re: Fund to accelerate Development

Post by FarbigeWelt »

My reason to use LuxCoreRender is because it is free and because I like its results. There was a time I used cycles due to missing support if luxrender. It was a nobrainer to switch to the new addon as soon as I catched the good news of new releases.
Because CGI has been a hobby of mine in times before RISC’s dawn in every household and is still is a hobby today since blender got a fresh and usable GUI. I don’t like to spend much money for software to get an average result or a lot to get a good result if there is s great open source softwate available. 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.
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