When setting up materials in LuxRender one needs to be conscious about it’s physically based nature. Thus it helps to know how how the various materials are modeled and how the parameters related to the real world. In this series of articles I’ll try to give some insight into this. First up are the basic materials: matte, glossy, glass and metal.
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Due to some minor issues I’m hosting the LuxRender CVS builds for Windows here.
luxrender_CVS_250410_x64.zip
luxrender_CVS_250410_SSE2.zip
luxrender_CVS_250410_SSE1.zip
One of the main features in the upcoming release of LuxRender is proper absorption in transparent media. Before, transparent materials, such as glass, had a single “transmission color”. As a ray entered the material, it was modulated (multiplied) by this color and again if it exited. The problem is that this doesn’t really match how transparent materials work. Thus a long-standing feature request was to implement “proper” absorption. Thanks to jeanphi’s hard work, the time has finally come! Read the rest of this entry
The first maintenance release of LuxRender has been released! Read the release notes and fire up those cores 
Just in case there’s an issue with the official downloads, I’m hosting the Windows builds here.
Installers
LuxRender 0.6.1 x64
LuxRender 0.6.1 x86 SSE2
LuxRender 0.6.1 x86 SSE1
Archives
LuxRender 0.6.1 x64
LuxRender 0.6.1 x86 SSE2
LuxRender 0.6.1 x86 SSE1
Happy rendering!
Having laid the groundwork in part 1, it is now time to actually simulate the interior of a white dwarf star. I’ve decided to use C# for this. I really like the C# language and with Mono it’s fairly trivial to make it cross-platform, which is nice.
I covered the basics needed in my post Numerical approximations to differential equations. In this case we have a system of coupled differential equations, meaning that each differential equation depends on the other. However the basic approach we’ll use to solve them are very similar to the way I described in that post. Read the rest of this entry