(rant/ramble) 3D Grandpa - everything is new and scary!

General project and community related discussions and offtopic threads.
Post Reply
TryToRemember
Posts: 10
Joined: Tue Jul 03, 2018 3:35 am

(rant/ramble) 3D Grandpa - everything is new and scary!

Post by TryToRemember »

I used to be very into rendering and 3d work, used to be a paying gig for me. But as the years roll on, you don't always get to do what you want...

So I have been out of 3d in general, and blender/lux/et al for many years.

blender used to have a cult following; if you came from maya or 3dsmax, Ton's design choices (not to mention the constant blender conference input) was maddening at first. But once you passed that rather steep learning curve, it finally made sense. It was fast, efficient, and you learned to "think blender" - you didn't consider the interface weird but an extension of your brain. 3d mesh modelling, keyframing, unwrapping and texturing, it became as natural. 2.37 was my jam, though. started back on 2.27 when it became open source. Used 2.37, and kept up thru 2.49, 5+ years of blendering...

When people started whining about the interface that could change things (ahem Matt!) it started annoying me. I hate re-learning the same thing, and I get that it might not have been everything for everyone the way it was, but what in the universe is?! Continual evolution is bad. Darn kids!

So imagine my surprise on installing 2.79, after 7-8 years from even installing/compiling/even opening blender... wow. And the audience seems to have grown, thousands seem active!

So while I'm still trying to customize 2.79 to something I recognize, I am glad is seems nearly every keypress is still what it was! Hurray for those who fought to keep it the same vs those who would have made it just like everything else. At least the learning curve is much much less curvy now.

BUT

I mean I've been out so long, what the hell is cycles? It appears to be the built-in replacement for yaf, but more complete? it's fast, I'll give it that.

re: Lux, where the hell are the files?! The exporter isn't exporting anything anymore, I see no files? This is annoying. So how can we resume renders? I see no way from the interface to enable this; the console output talks about all these ALPHA.png and RGBA_IMAGEPIPELINE_0.png but I guess they only exist in memory, as they damn sure don't exist on disk!

(Just curious ... all the old crew still around? Obviously dade is and byob already answered me. Can't wait to annoy radiance, jeanphi, tomb, jensverwiebe etc with my re-newb questions. :D )

grandpa is gonna try a nap now, too much excitement.
User avatar
Dade
Developer
Developer
Posts: 5672
Joined: Mon Dec 04, 2017 8:36 pm
Location: Italy

Re: (rant/ramble) 3D Grandpa - everything is new and scary!

Post by Dade »

TryToRemember wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2018 5:39 am re: Lux, where the hell are the files?! The exporter isn't exporting anything anymore, I see no files? This is annoying.
You can still export the scene in text format but it is now an operation you have to explicitly ask.
TryToRemember wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2018 5:39 am (Just curious ... all the old crew still around? Obviously dade is and byob already answered me. Can't wait to annoy radiance, jeanphi, tomb, jensverwiebe etc with my re-newb questions. :D )
Talking about Radiance would require a spy-story-like book-size post :lol: Trying to kill the project, Octane, etc. Others are not active on the project anymore, busy with family, work and their lives.
Support LuxCoreRender project with salts and bounties
User avatar
B.Y.O.B.
Developer
Developer
Posts: 4146
Joined: Mon Dec 04, 2017 10:08 pm
Location: Germany
Contact:

Re: (rant/ramble) 3D Grandpa - everything is new and scary!

Post by B.Y.O.B. »

TryToRemember wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2018 5:39 am So how can we resume renders? I see no way from the interface to enable this;
I have re-written the whole addon from scratch, and while most of the old features are back, this one was not yet integrated in a nice, user-friendly way.
You can export your scene, in text or binary format, and render it with luxcoreui (a program included in the standalone download of LuxCoreRender). In luxcoreui you can save and resume a render like in old LuxRender.
However this is expert stuff, luxcoreui is for developers.
I'm thinking about writing a user-friendly standalone interface for LuxCore, but I'm currently in the last stages of my studies, so it will have to wait a few more weeks.
TryToRemember
Posts: 10
Joined: Tue Jul 03, 2018 3:35 am

Re: (rant/ramble) 3D Grandpa - everything is new and scary!

Post by TryToRemember »

not that a rant should turn into an actual thread but I kind of remember, and that shit is/was funny!

lol, so no one ever got ahold of octane source to prove it was lux and he was just another (sadly all too common) open source guy who wanted to change the license to get paid for "all his" work, and kill off his open release(s)... regardless of everyone elses' years worth of contributions, and in this case, especially the mathematicians who contributed the formulae he likely doesn't even truly understand, many since before he was born? (I found old threads from '10 about naming the first release 0.7 and other stabs at the project, yeesh.)

Wait, so did Terrence ever try to "bring you on board" so to speak? Help him kill lux? Come over to octane, here's a paycheck! Screw those losers, let's get paid son! (or whatever). So hey MAYBE you should write that spy novel, might find you have a talent for it! Seems the characters write themselves. :-) The 3d community is pretty large these days, bigger than I'd ever have thought a decade ago. Huge audience.

byob, dude I'm sorry, feels like I touched a nerve! Please don't feel like I don't care about all your efforts and that one thing is what I miss. It was a passing preponderance about lux features I remember using, and yes I found the button to enable traditional exporting. I'm more comfortable with that route anyway, and once I get up to speed again it will be rendering on a different machine I'm ssh'd into, so via-the-blender-interface is not any personal priority I will annoy you about. Your tone says people are complaining about that one feature more than any other. (did you re-implement Dade's 'frickin' lazor' emitter?! huh? huh?!) So refactoring wasn't possible, a total rewrite? Just too many contributors to learn everyone's style of coding, or does this have anything to do with Dade's answer and rad's code? Add a chapter to the novel if so! lol

well not that my opinion means anything, but I'm glad lux still actively exists... I mean it outlived nv's Gelato! It was commercial when I "got out" then it went OSS then it died, all in my absence. Still a bit stunned on that, but time marches on... oh my achin back. Wheres my pills?
User avatar
B.Y.O.B.
Developer
Developer
Posts: 4146
Joined: Mon Dec 04, 2017 10:08 pm
Location: Germany
Contact:

Re: (rant/ramble) 3D Grandpa - everything is new and scary!

Post by B.Y.O.B. »

No worries, I'm not annoyed or anything.
TryToRemember wrote: Sun Jul 08, 2018 5:31 pm did you re-implement Dade's 'frickin' lazor' emitter?! huh? huh?!
Yes, it's available in the area light settings: https://wiki.luxcorerender.org/BlendLux ... Panel#Area
TryToRemember wrote: Sun Jul 08, 2018 5:31 pm So refactoring wasn't possible, a total rewrite? Just too many contributors to learn everyone's style of coding, or does this have anything to do with Dade's answer and rad's code?
No, it has nothing to do with radiance.
I just got kind of fed up with all the compatibility stuff I had to deal with in LuxBlend, I had the feeling that 50% of bugs were related to staying compatible with both Classic Lux and LuxCore. It made programming less fun. Another part was probably that every programmer has his own preferences how to do things. For example LuxBlend had a lot of abstraction layers for the UI code, and I don't think they were better than just writing Blender UI code directly.
So I secretly started a rewrite of the addon. My plan was to bring it into a basic usable state alone, then announce it to the public. But before I got far, everyone kinda lost interest in the whole LuxRender project and I did not develop my pet further.
Then a few months later Dade asked us if we would join him in a reboot of the project. I hopped on board, dusted off the code of the new addon and started to write it for real :)
Thanks to the contribution of Neo we now have most features supported that the old addon had.
I think a lot of stuff is now solved in a better way, but of course there is also a lot that I think needs a cleanup already.

Unfortunately I started to write my bachelor's thesis a few months ago so I had less time for BlendLuxCore than I had wished for.
But in a few weeks that is done and then I'll continue.
User avatar
Dade
Developer
Developer
Posts: 5672
Joined: Mon Dec 04, 2017 8:36 pm
Location: Italy

Re: (rant/ramble) 3D Grandpa - everything is new and scary!

Post by Dade »

TryToRemember wrote: Sun Jul 08, 2018 5:31 pm lol, so no one ever got ahold of octane source to prove it was lux and he was just another (sadly all too common) open source guy who wanted to change the license to get paid for "all his" work, and kill off his open release(s)... regardless of everyone elses' years worth of contributions, and in this case, especially the mathematicians who contributed the formulae he likely doesn't even truly understand, many since before he was born? (I found old threads from '10 about naming the first release 0.7 and other stabs at the project, yeesh.)
I have more the feeling that, at some point, the very first embryonic version of Octane was a new version of Lux. I doubt that it had very much to share with old Lux sources so I don't think there was any license violation. However, what has really upset people still working on Lux, at the time, was the tentative to arbitrarily kill the open source project (the website was taken down from night and day, stuff like that).
Support LuxCoreRender project with salts and bounties
Post Reply