Does the luxology renderer integration exist?

[robster]

Hi all,

I want to do some rendering in freeCAD but I see povray hasn't had an update in about 10 years or more and luxology is moving ahead. I can't find a way to get luxology to work. Can anyone offer some advice? Thank you

[vocx]

Hi all,

I want to do some rendering in freeCAD but I see povray hasn't had an update in about 10 years or more and luxology is moving ahead. I can't find a way to get luxology to work. Can anyone offer some advice? Thank you

Have you tried the POV-Ray and Luxrender tutorials? I personally haven't used them but they seem pretty straight forward, and at least a user reported success with POV-Ray recently; see Tutorials#Rendering; FreeCAD / pov ray tutorial.

I have used Blender, which I think isn't as hard to use as it first seems. Basically, you can take your FreeCAD geometry export it to Wavefront .obj, then import it into Blender; then you add materials (Principled BSFD is all you need), lighting, and set up the camera. If you want a simple render it doesn't take much time, especially with Blender 2.80 and the EEVEE renderer. It will take more time if you want to get a photorealistic result with Cycles, but for a simple render EEVEE may be enough.

I haven't used luxology at all, and the Raytracing module doesn't have support for it directly as far as I know. Support for it could be added, but the Raytracing Workbench is basically unmaintained, so nobody will do it if nobody looks seriously into it.

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There is a plugin for Blender to import FreeCAD files directly, which could help you set the render more easily, plugin.

However, it's a bit tricky to make it work, as you need to have both Blender and FreeCAD compiled against the same version of Python, that is, Python 2.7, or 3.4, or 3.7, etc. Currently Blender seems to be distributed with Python 3.7, while FreeCAD is on 3.6 in some platforms, so this may be an issue that you can solve re-compiling FreeCAD or Blender (only for power users I'm afraid).

Despite this, the path that I mentioned above, FreeCAD --> .obj --> Blender, should work.

[quick61]

Hi all,

I want to do some rendering in freeCAD but I see povray hasn't had an update in about 10 years or more and luxology is moving ahead. I can't find a way to get luxology to work. Can anyone offer some advice? Thank you

What is luxology? I looked it up and all I can find under that name is a company that made modo and was merged with the foundry that puts modo out as well as nuke, mari, and several others. I see Mari is only $2068.00 US to own and $689 / qtr to rent.

Now if your talking about luxrender, now known as LuxCoreRender that's a completely different product. If that's what you are referring to, the first thing I will ask is have you told FreeCAD where to find LuxCoreRender in your preferences?

The one thing about POVray is, it kind of just works, is well documented, and seems to be the main raytracer used by people in the FreeCAD community that do any rendering to their models. Outside of that, one can always export their work as a mesh(s) and use Blender for your rendering, which is very up to date and extremely powerful, with your choice of several render engines, Blender, Cycles or even LuxCoreRender as an add on.

Mark

[Kunda1]

Looks like POVray is still getting some love https://github.com/POV-Ray/povray/commits/master