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BlendLuxCore

Camera, Materials and Shading, Rendering

The BlendluxCore addon connects Blender with the Luxcore render. And the download contains de Luxcore render as well, so all we have to do is install the addon. The Luxcore render might not that integrated in Blender as Cycles is, but it seems to be a very good render engine. The Luxcore render has some features that Cycles doesn’t have.

How to use the BlendLuxCore addon

Actually the BlendLuxeCore addon is pretty straight forward. It could take some time to realize settings are for Blender and what settings in Blender for the Render Engine. This, in case you didn’t try other render-engines in the past. Namely, most render engines have their own materials, own light setting, camera settings and of course render settings. What is not included in Render Engines usually is the tools to create and model mesh in 3D space. That latter one is pure Blender. So, you will see changes in the Render Settings, Camera Tab, Shader Editor and light settings.

A few tips to start with.

Luxcore seems to use the term OpenCL for AMD as well as NVIDEA (cuda). This in case you think “No my system doesn’t work with OpenCL”, then don’t worry to much. Note: there is an explanation in the comments below about OpenCL and CUDA!
If you used to render on Graphics card, in Properties Panel > Render Settings, you set: Device: OpenCL.
Set also OpenCL for rendering in the viewport. (Scroll down in the Render TAB to; LuxCore Viewport Settings.
Huge denoise improvement. (Tried Lux Render, years ago). You can enable it in the Render Tab.
You might wonder how to set the amount of samples for rendering. You can find such a setting under: Properties Panel > Render Tab > LuxCore Halt Conditions. There you can set the samples, or you can set other conditions, like based on time or based on noise.
LuxCore render has some good ToolTips with good explanations what each setting does. I managed it to render without a visit to the documentation because of this.
LuxCore has it’s own material Node Tree called: Luxcore Material Nodes.
Take a look at the interesting settings for Camera as well under Properties Panel > Camera Settings. Scrolling down, you will find settings called: Image Pipeline. This contains settings like: ToneMapper, Bloom, Mist, Vignetting, Color Aberration, Background image, Analog Film Simulation and Irradiance Contour Lines. Also Clipping plane and Depth of field are available.
In the Scene Tab we can create Light-groups. When adding a light to the scene we can assign a light to a particular light-group. Later when render is finished we can then play with the intensity of the light-groups. Interesting also is that we can use IES lights.

Where to download the BlendLuxCore addon?

You can download the BlendLuxCore addon on Github. Be sure to use the link there: There is a testbuild for Blender 2.80, available here.

The installation is pretty straight forward. Like other addons, download the .zip file and in Blender you go to Edit > Preferences > Addons > Install. Then you browse to the .zip file you just downloaded and press Install. Then save preferences and refresh.