BlendLuxCore Addon
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.
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Just a minor comment: Luxcore “uses the term” OpenCL for both AMD and Nvidia, because it’s using OpenCL (and not CUDA) for both AMD and Nvidia (and Intel, and every other compatible device):
OpenCL and CUDA are 2 different APIs for the same thing (GPGPU), like for example OpenGL and DirectX for 3D graphics. The former is an open standard by Khronos (the same group behind OpenGL and Vulkan), and supported by all major manufacturers (AMD, Nvidia and Intel), while the later is a propietary Nvidia API (obviously Nvidia only). Luxcore is programmed on top of OpenCL for its GPGPU, regardless of the hardware you run it on. It doesn’t use CUDA at all.
Blender Cycles has BOTH an OpenCL and a CUDA back-end. AFAIK, you can use the OpenCL back-end in every OpenCL compatible GPU too (even Nvidia or Intel), but (obviously) you can only use the CUDA one with Nvidia cards…
The reason for this is that Cycles was originally ported to GPU on CUDA for Nvidia only, and the OpenCL implementation only came after. Since the beginning and until very recently, the OpenCL version was playing catch up to the CUDA one, so the later was kept as the primary GPGPU target. Now that (again, AFAIK) there’s feature parity, I fully expect Blender to change the focus over to OpenCL (which covers all bases) at some point and actually drop CUDA support not long after, even if the performance is slightly higher with CUDA for Nvidia GPUs. It’s simply absurd to allocate development and mantainance resources to develop 2 different redundant back-ends when one of them cover all the bases by itself, akin to maintain a DirectX renderer for Windows only when Windows can run the same OpenGL one that everything else uses…
Hi Cagarruto,
Thanks for the explanation! I will add a note in the post that there is further explanation in the comments.
Regards,
Robert
Cagarruto, good explanation but…
OpenCL on Blender doesn’t work for Intel cards (it’s literally deactivated in source code, to test Intel GPU, using intel-opencl NEO for example, you need to force acceptation in source code and recompile Blender yourself, then Cycles makes a SegFault on GPU render)
Blender focuses the development for professionals now, and they won’t abandon CUDA – it’s sad that an open source software focus on proprietary driver but that’s unfortunately the case. Or… community can make effort to try to fix up that !
I’m currently speaking with opencl-intel and IGC developers to find why and how to fix the segfault. But one more time, that’s not the priority of Blender developer team (at this time, and for a long time IMHO)