Lux Render Film Response Samples
I always been curious about using Blender but it suffered with the most opaque user interface of any 3D software that I know of. There is a lot of appeal in an application that is always on the cutting edge, has more features than a bundle of other programmes and comes in at a very attractive price point (its FREE!), but the user interface would leave me climbing the walls and uninstalling in a fit of rage at my obvious lack of intelligence for not being able to even apply a texture map to a cube.
Those days are gone now, since version 2.5 the interface was dramatically improved with meaningful buttons that do what your expecting them to do and I now get what all the sliding, switching windows is all about. Best of all though is the mature integration of the almighty Lux Render exporter which I could never get working properly on my Windows 7 64 bit system before. I still had to perform a bit of jiggery pokery to get it installed, but now it is fully functional it is quite amazing.
The latest version of Blender comes with Cycles render engine which is fascinating and exciting but not yet polished enough for production use, I'll get into Cycles next time I get a new graphics card, but it doesn't matter anyway as I have Lux at my fingertips.
Blender is now so good that I'm switching over to it being my main assembly and rendering application, with Hexagon and Carrara as support apps contributing modelling and the occasional human figure setup (I've been using them for years and for me they still have the better user interfaces).
Anyway I wrote this article to help me quickly visualise how the different film response filters provided in Lux could potentially enhance the final look of my finished art work. The scene itself is relatively simple, just a walled box with a wooden planked floor and a light emitter inside Suzanne the monkey's head which I gave a translucent material. The look I was after was to replicate the glowing night light that my daughter insists we keep in the hallway to assist night time toilet trips.
So here you go even if you don't find them useful I think its interesting to see the filters laid out like this.
As you can see some are quite extreme and others are very subtle in their variance. Please bear in mind that the results I've shown here are based on the image that I produced and a single exposure bracket, different images will of course look considerably different, however I've provided this collection as a reference guide to how the various film response filters available in Lux Render can enhance your images.
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