Taming The Dimensions 
Marie Brown
Marie Brown is an experienced writer and a less experienced 3D artist. Her interests include creating 3D content, experimenting with different software and render engines, and learning how to make 3D imagery so fabulous that no one will question whether it's art or not. HDRI Lighting In LuxRenderSeptember 28th, 2014 by Marie Brown
Just a quick, simple trick today. I’ve been obsessing over lighting for a while now, and I ran across a chance comment online that made me finally take a look at using HDRI lighting in Lux. I’ve made the attempt before, but was operating on less-than-accurate information, and never got it to work. So, just in case there’s anyone else out there that heard you need to use the goniometric light in Lux as an HDRI light source, well, you don’t. Someone online mentioned using the HDRI images from the Bryce freebie Golden Lighting in Lux. Now, I admit, I never once thought of doing that, because in my compartmentalized little mind, Bryce HDRIs tend to light Bryce scenes, and Bryce doesn’t play nice with Lux. So, once I got over feeling a bit dumb, I decided to take a shot at lighting an image with one of the Golden Lighting HDRIs. Real clever, eh? I’ve already discovered using the goniometric light for IBL (image-based lighting) is something of a pain. Not to say it can’t be done, it’s just not something I’m happy doing yet. So I dug around in the LuxRender docs and found a much simpler alternative to the goniometric route. Ready for this? It’s real simple… First, set up your scene in DAZ Studio. Second, create a plane primitive (Create>New Primitive>Plane). Make it a big one, I used 1000m. Rotate it 90 degrees on the X axis and position it behind your scene, as a backdrop. You may have to adjust it more after the first test-render. Third, turn the plane into a LuxRender light source (select plane, right-click Parameters tab, choose “Luxus – LuxRender Light”, then select “infinite” as the type). And fourth, look under the parameters for “LuxRender Light”. Where it says “LuxRender Infinite Light – Enviroment Map”, load your HDRI image of choice. Then set up your render settings the way you like them, and hit render. You’ll have nice HDRI-generated lighting bathing your scene. Now wasn’t that easy? Just for comparison, so you can see what a nice HDRI can do in Lux, I’ve rendered the exact same image with 3Delight, and then again with Lux. Here’s the 3Delight version:
And here’s what Lux has to offer:
There you go. Simple HDRI lighting in LuxRender. |
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