LuxRender 1.4 ships
Version 1.4 of open-source renderer LuxRender has been officially released. The update adds few new features, but should bring about considerable improvements in performance.
LuxRender for newcomers
A physically based renderer with plugins for a range of 3D applications, including 3ds Max, Blender, Cinema 4D, Maya and Softimage, LuxRender has been developed since 2007, hitting an official 1.0 release in 2012.
The software got an unexpected publicity boost when Adobe used it for its #3DPhotoMagic demo last year, which showed a 3D model being dragged and dropped onto a photo and lit and rendered to match in real time.
Version 1.4: speed up, even when run on the CPU alone
Version 1.4 doesn’t add many new features to the software: aside from bugfixes, the main changes are antialiasing in the render view, and support for the OpenColorIO colour-management framework.
However, it forms “an intermediate step towards the complete rearchitecturing of LuxRender around the LuxCore library … designed to use all the processing power of your computer: CPU, GPU, or network nodes”.
According to a post on the release thread, LuxCore rendering modes “are at least two times faster” than their predecessors, even when run on the CPU alone.
Availability and system requirements
LuxRender 1.4 is available for download now for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Import plugins for compatible 3D applications can also be downloaded via the link below.
Read a full list of changes in LuxRender 1.4 in the release thread on the LuxRender forums