Quote - It's definitely going to take some time for me. I literally zero experience as a photographer (I rarely even use my phone camera), so trying to think like one is probably not doing my renders much good at the moment.

When I say "think as a photographer" I mean to be an observer of reality, the real life. Photographers use real lights, not that approximation that most 3D programs offer. I'll give you an example. A few days ago I needed to recreate the effect of a candle in a render. So, I literally grabbed a candle and observed how the shadow of an object was going to be affected by the proximity of the candle of the wall, in respect to the object.

If you use a flashlight or a light fixture you can discover how light works. Once you have a setup that you like you can reproduce that in Reality faithfully. Observe the real light and you will have the key to lighting efficiently in Reality/Lux. There are also plenty of books from public libraries about lighting. An hour spent reading a lighting text will do more than 10 hours of guesswork.

Quote - I think the difficulty for me is largely that the render times are quite longer than 3Delight, so I don't tend to notice that I'm not getting the intended results until it's done a fair number of samples.

Render times are indeed longer but not that much. If you set up a scene with some of the more sophisticated lighting system of 3Delight the times can be as long if not even longer than Lux, with the penalty that nothing shows on the screen for a long time. The secret, again, is to work efficiently with lights. Lux requires a fraction of the lights used with 3Delight. If you light your scene like you were using 3Delight, and then render with Lux, you will be penalized. I suggest to start simple: use one single meshlight. Play with that forcing yourself to only use one single meshlight. You will discover a world of possibilities and renders that come up pretty quickly.

Another "mistake" that I see often from newcomers is to set up the resolution too high. Set your initial scene at something like 960x540. Do some tests. The image will come up quickly. When you are sure about what you want then turn the resolution up and render the final image.

Quote - Another thing I'm used to doing (albeit largely to work with biased renderers) is being able to set a texture to full ambient so it's bright whatever the lighting.

I don't know what that means, if you mean to turn a material to light it's a a click away in Reality. Right-click on the material and select "Turn to light". Please forgive me for asking, but, did you check the Reality User's Guide? It seams that a few issues that you have are explained in the guide. I know that it's a not fun to read manuals but the RUG really has a lot of useful information :) > Quote - That said, there is one thing I'm very curious about and that's the "Load Shaders" option in the drop down. Does this only load ACSEL shaders made through Reality? I downloaded some Lux materials from the site, but there doesn't seem to be a way to integrade those shaders into Reality. It probably seems like an obvious answer, but considering the drop down has options which actually **specify **they're ACSEL, and that one doesn't I just had to query it.

Those Lux materials are only interfaced by LuxBlend and cannot be loaded by Reality. To tell you the truth, there are no many of them and it will be just faster to create them in Reality 3 than to build an import system for those. If they become more of a trend I will reconsider but right now there is not enough content in there to justify an importer.

Hope this helps.

Paolo

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