LuxRender

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LuxRender is no longer in development as the project has been rebooted as LuxCoreRender with a major code rewriting and a lot of compatibility breaking changes. The information here is provided because by default FreeCAD is still shipped (as of 0.19-24276) with the Raytracing Workbench, that officially only supports LuxRender. Anyway it also seem to work with LuxCoreRender, so consider giving it a try before using LuxRender

Description

LuxRender is one of the two render engines supported by the Raytracing Workbench together with POV-Ray. In 2013 the project has been rebooted becoming LuxCoreRender, with a major code rewriting and compatibility breaking changes, thus the LuxRender project has been abandoned. Officially LuxCoreRender is not supported by the Raytracing Workbench, although it might be worth to try.

Installation

Raytracing Workbench

The Raytracing Workbench is being superseded by the new Render Workbench, which is intended as its replacement. The Render Workbench can be installed through the Addon Manager. The information here is provided because by default FreeCAD is still shipped (as of 0.19-24276) with the Raytracing Workbench

Stable Version

The latest stable version is LuxRender 1.6 (2017-12-28).

Linux

Compiled binaries

As LuxRender is no longer developed, almost no distribution still has it in its repositories, so you will have to manually install the official binaries. First determine if your graphic cards supports OpenCL and if you have all the necessary dependencies installed. If so, download LuxRender 1.6 with OpenCL support. Otherwise download LuxRender 1.6 without OpenCL, but consider getting a newer graphic card or installing the necessary software to enable it on your computer.

The faster solution (although not the best practice) is to extract the content of the archive in a suitable location, like ~\LuxRender. If needed change the file permissions so that your user can execute the files you just extracted.

Compiling from source

If your distributions does not have LuxRender in the repositories and the official binaries do not work on your distribution, or if you wish to, it is possible to compile LuxRender from source. Download the source code of LuxRender 1.6 from GitHub

Configuring FreeCAD

After installing LuxRender, launch FreeCAD, open the Preferences Editor, load the Raytracing Workbench, and go to the Raytracing Preferences.

Set the Luxrender executable path to point to your installation of LuxRender, in particular to the luxrender executable, and apply. In the above example, the path would be ~\LuxRender\luxrender.

macOS

Use the official LuxRender 1.6 installer for OSX.

Windows

First determine if your graphic cards supports OpenCL and if you have the necessary graphics drivers installed. If so, download LuxRender 1.6 with OpenCL support setup. Otherwise download LuxRender 1.6 without OpenCL setup, but consider getting a newer graphic card or installing the necessary software to enable it on your computer. Then execute the downloaded installer and follow the proposed steps.

By default the destination folder is C:\Program Files\LuxRender, with example scenes in C:\Users\Public\Documents\LuxRender\Example Scene.

After installing LuxRender, launch FreeCAD, open the Preferences Editor, load the Raytracing Workbench, and go to the Raytracing Preferences.

Set the Luxrender executable path to point to your installation of LuxRender, usually it is C:/Program Files/LuxRender/luxrender.exe, and apply.

Development Version

There is no development version of LuxRender, as development has been halted in favor of the reboot LuxCoreRender.

Render Workbench

The Render Workbench has dropped support for LuxRender, as it is outdated. It supports instead the modern reboot LuxCoreRender.