LuxCoreRender, Fur Rendering, Performance improvements and a new Prelewd animation

Hey all! Here's another quick overview of what's currently being worked on 😋

Filmmaker

LuxCoreRender

I've added support for LuxCoreRender, which is a pathtracing rendering engine like Cycles. (You can see some example renders on their official website: https://luxcorerender.org/gallery/)

Cycles and LuxCoreRender are both generally very similar, although LuxCoreRender has a more realistic lighting model and much better caustics. The main reason I've added support for LuxCoreRender, however, is that it's a hell of a lot easier to work with from a development standpoint (The Cycles API is awful by comparison and changes frequently with new updates, which makes it very time consuming and frustrating to maintain).

You'll be able to simply switch between Cycles and LuxCoreRender in the PFM render settings once the implementation is ready, and I'll also render some comparison shots between Cycles and LuxCoreRender to highlight the differences, but there are a few things that aren't quite complete yet.

Hair/Fur rendering

One of the things that is much easier to accomplish with LuxCoreRender is rendering hair/fur, which is something I've wanted to try for a while. I still had to write my own algorithm for the hair placement, but it actually turned out better than expected, considering it was just a test:

(Special thanks to WigWoo for the model!)

The individual hair are currently just single segments and I haven't added support for clumping, forces (e.g. brownian motion) etc. yet, so the end-result should look much better once it's all complete.

The way it'll work is that you'll be able to simply enable fur for a specific material, which will add the fur automatically to all models using that material (only when rendering with LuxCoreRender for now, however).

You'll also be able to specify an optional fur texture map for controlled hair density (e.g. if you want certain parts of the model to have less or no fur).

Engine

Performance improvements

I've spent a few weeks completely overhauling my rendering systems for the Engine. This is something that's been on my todo-list for a long time, since my old implementation was... not that great to say the least.

Pragma now has a proper multi-threaded renderer and the general performance should be much better than before, especially with Vulkan and in VR.

I've also implemented an auto-instancing system, which drastically increases performance if many objects with the same model are on screen at the same time:

(That's approximately 10k barrels at ~70 fps on my GTX 1050 Ti. Please ignore the shoddy lighting...)

There's still plenty I can do to optimize it further, but for the time being this should be more than enough for most maps and scenes.

Lightmap baking

This is also something I've started working on a while back and I've finally made some progress on – Lightmap baking with Cycles:

Still needs a bit of tweaking and this map isn't the best to show it off, but basically it means you can now bake high-quality lightmaps inside Pragma using Cycles, both for static level geometry and static props. Sadly there is no way to bake directional lighting information with Cycles (as far as I know, please correct me if I'm wrong!), but it's still a big improvement over the original Source Engine lightmaps.

Prelewd

I've mostly been busy with Engine updates, so there are no new features, but I'm working on adding a new animation (courtesy of DesireSFM!):

(NSFW / Futa) https://pragma-engine.com/share/prelewd/ciri_riding_preview.mp4 

(It's a futa animation but you can always replace the models if that's not your thing ;) )

I mostly just need to fix some shadow and lightmap issues, set up the VR cameras, tweak the materials and a few other things, it shouldn't take too long to get it all ready.

I'm also working on setting up a SubscribeStar profile as an alternative to Patreon (mostly in case Patreon ever decides to completely ban pornographic content). It will have the exact same rewards as my Patreon, so you won't be missing out on anything on either platform ;).

Anyway, the update's not out yet, since it's still somewhat work-in-progress, but here's the preliminary changelog:

https://wiki.pragma-engine.com/books/pragma-engine/page/changelog 

Thanks everyone! The Engine updates were somewhat time consuming this time, but the next post shouldn't take as long as this one. 😅 

And I hope you're all hanging in there, despite the circumstances...