following up on my visit to the Blender Conference last week, I wanted to summarize some things relevant to LuxCoreRender that I discussed with other participants, have seen in talks, etc.
(Where applicable, further details have been written into the corresponding GitHub-Issues.)
- I met with the developers of FlipFluids, who recently reached out on the Forums. Their request for an attribute node is already documented on GitHub. They mentioned that splatting for rendering foam would also be a great addition for their application.
- At the Intel booth on Thursday, I had a brief discussion with two developers. A particular topic was the GPU frameworks, i.e. CUDA, OpenCL, our need for Metal, possibly Vulkan, etc. They suggested we could look also into the "SYCL" framework. I have added this as a note to this GitHub-Issue: https://github.com/LuxCoreRender/LuxCore/issues/659
In Addition, it was a reminder to myself to remove some outdated filtering of intel devices for OpenCL rendering from BlendLuxCore, which I did immediately on the for_v2.11 and bugfix_v2.10 branches, as it was a small thing. https://github.com/LuxCoreRender/BlendL ... issues/262 - Regarding extension development workflows, I had some discussion with Sofus Rose who is developing "blext", a utility for extension development. See https://codeberg.org/zcpbx/blext
A few points seemed very similar to things we encountered, so it seems worth checking out. - I brought up the topic of releasing BlendLuxCore on the Blender extension platform. The background here is that we do not currently bundle BlendLuxCore according to the rules for reason of file size (including dependencies). There is somewhat of an alternative approach, where the user still has to do an initial installation step, but then can use the internal "update" feature. Details have been added in this GitHub-Issue: https://github.com/LuxCoreRender/BlendL ... issues/919
- I brought up LuxCoreRender as much as I could to let people know that we still exist and are active again. The word had not yet spread everywhere. For example, the garagefarm.net rendering service is still providing some v2.6 runtime, but were not aware that there is the new 2.10 release.
- In addition, I used some occasions to actively mention that we need developers. I must say that I did not expect much direct feedback here, as the participants at BCON are either not programmers or are there because they are already working on elaborate projects, but at least I tried to spread awareness. I did get a contact of one programmer, however he is a freelance extension developer, i.e. that would be paid work and we don't have the donations funds for much of that yet.
- My lens design talk was surprisingly well visited and I got a good amount of resonance. I hope this also put LuxCore on the map further
The talk is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoHFN9LF7rg - The recent addition of OSL cameras to Cycles was of course very interesting to me personally, and I had a bit of exchange with Lukas Stockner for this general field. Something i have to try out myself more still, as I had no time recently.
Watch his talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT_AiNSHpDQ - Cycles is planning to add Dispersion to Glass BSDF, but they will actually carry the wavelength as a property of the sample, not the continuous random draw that LuxCore does. I suggest we adapt our implementation as well, even before tackling full spectral rendering.
Regards,
Johannes