With the release of Blender 2.57 we finally get our hands on a stable version of the 2.5 series, and can start to look for add-ons, external render engines and stuff like that to work with architectural visualization. One of the best external render engines that work with Blender just got a new Release Candidate this week, and I`m talking about LuxRender. Now we have LuxRender 0.8 RC3, which is really close to get a stable release just like Blender.
I just made the upgrade to this new release of LuxRender, and so far all my tests went just fine. If you want to know more about the updates and fixes of this new RC of LuxRender, just visit this thread at the LuxRender user forums.
You can expect some LuxRender 0.8 tutorials along side with Blender for architecture in the future.
Yes, I’m excited about using this release candidate, and more excited about the stable release coming soon. I’m really looking forward to the OpenCL-support finally being completed with LuxRender. With LuxRender becoming more powerful and faster, I hope this mean we’ll see more architectural visualizations from various artists. I think that sometimes the idea of spending a long time rendering with an external renderer turns some folks off from using them to render complex architectural scenes, esp. folks with consumer-level computers. But I hope with GPGPU support coming to LuxRender soon, that’ll change.