Realistic glass in Luxrender

In luxrender, there are 2 ways to do glass, glass and glass2 material type.  Glass2 is more complicated, but looks much nicer. 

To start, go to the World tab, and create a new volume.  From there you'll have a selection of material types to choose from.  I went with crown glass.  assign a color (or not), and maybe play around with absorption.

When you are satisfied, go to a Glass2 material, and in "interior" use the volume you just created.

After rendering for a couple hours, this is what I got.

Glowing materials in Luxrender

There's a very easy way to make glowing materials while using Luxrender in Blender.

When making a material, simply tick the box that says "Luxrender emission". You can play around with the options if your like, I'll simply choose a color and assign it to a light group.

After a little while rendering, I've got this.

Cathedral

Here's a model of a Gothic cathedral that I made in Sketchup, textured with Blender, and rendered in Luxrender.

Sketchup to Blender

I had been introduced to Google Sketchup before Blender, and while I always use Blender to render, and apply materials to finished product, I'll often use Sketchup to make the model itself. Here's a quick way to import any Sketchup file into Blender.

I'll use a model of a couch I used for a larger project.  Make sure that before you export, you explode any groups that are in your model, otherwise they just won't exist in blender.

Simply export the exploded model as a Collada.dae file.

Import the file.

Expect your model to be oversized.  If you don't see it, you might have to adjust your clipping, to let you see further.  If the model is very far from the center, then it was probably very far from the central axes in Sketchup.

Here's a completed render I made using that model.  I find Sketchup easy to use, but the model sometimes behave strangely in Blender.  Firstly, it converts all polygons to triangles, making it hard the change in Blender.    Also, when you apply a UV texture anywhere in the scene, the faces will appear one-sided, some looking as if they disappeared, however they render as normal.  Because of this, I make sure that I don't have to change anything in the model before importing to Blender, as editing it is almost impossible.

Wallpaper: Companion cube

I made this wallpaper after beating portal 2.  I was initially going to make the model, but I found a great model on the Sketchup warehouse.  I exported it into a COLLADA.dae file, and imported into Blender.  I then had to separate the faces into 3 objects, all for different materials. I was using Luxrender, so I applied the glowing pink material, the light grey and dark grey,  the light grey and dark grey being glossy, with the roughness turned up.  The floor was just a basic glossy floor.  I had three lights, the pink material, a point lamp, and a hemisphere, all in different light groups.  After starting the render, I turned down the hemisphere, and let the pink and point lamp dominate.