LuxCoreRender Release Notes v2.11

BlendLuxCore

• Fresnel texture: "custom n,k" now accepts values > 1
• Change installation mechanism to use bpy.utils.extension_path_user() (Reworked again within the scope of BlendLuxHelper)
• Include "OptiX" in addon settings label to avoid user questions about compatibility
• Added a workaround for a Blender bug that throws an error when Blender is closed
• Added a Linux development shell script (optional utility for developers) (replaced by BlendLuxHelper)
• Remove leftover code from the Addons system that is no longer used with the Extensions system.
• BlendLuxHelper: A new helper, in the form of a Blender extension, which allows to configure the wheel which is imported by BlendLuxCore.
• Limit float values in viewport render to 16-bit in order to avoid overexposed areas being displayed as black.
• Remove default filtering of Intel GPU devices
• Add a checkbox to the material output node for enabling an override: When using shadow color, this allows light rays in addition to the shadow rays. (default off == no light rays, only shadow rays)

LuxCore

• Reduction of Boost footprint, replaced with standard equivalents available in C++20.
• For the need of previous point: replacement of apple-clang by clang 20 on MacOS platforms
• New target 'wheel-test' that builds a testing wheel in local build (make wheel-test)
• Requirement checking in make deps
• luxrays: rename GetConfigDir as GetCacheDir and use XDG_CACHE_HOME according to specifications (@illwieckz)
• Subdivision: add an "adaptive" setting to select between adaptive refinement and uniform refinement
• Subdivision: multithreaded version
• Fix a bug leading to unstable brightness between renderings when using saved crashes (Credit to FELIX Render developers)
• Fix volume evaluation in BiDir engine https://github.com/LuxCoreRender/LuxCore/issues/647
• Fix various bugs when using orthographic camera with light tracing https://github.com/LuxCoreRender/LuxCore/issues/667
• Apply the behavior of the BiDir engine w.r.t. shadow color mechanism to Path+Light tracing. Breaking change for scenes using shadow color and light tracing (not BiDir)!

LuxCoreDeps

• Dependencies updated to latest versions
• Removed a workaround introduced in previous version (we used to build a fake wheel to get containerization)
• OpenMP - MacOS: Use of homebrew OpenMP (up-to-date, compatible with clang 20) rather than Conan llvm-openmp (version 17...). As a consequence, for MacOS Intel, a version >= 13.0 is required.
• Opensubdiv: tbb activation. As a consequence, for MacOS Arm, a version >= 14.2 is required.
• OpenImageIO: deactivation of several image formats that seem unrelated to or unsupported by LuxCore: freetype, hdf5, ffmpeg, libheif, ptex, opencv, webp. This removal spares both compilation time and build result size. Those formats are reactivable, in case they were missing.
• OpenImageIO: To the contrary, activation of tbb option.
• Embree: Upgraded to version 4.
• libjpeg: Replaced with libjpeg-turbo