On a lower-brow note, Ms. Hao has excellent coding style, viz. her use of whitespace and leading commas (indicating call sequence).

Thanks for posting this amazing walkthrough! I'm new to luxcorerender and am trying to get this notebook to work. When I evaluate the notebook and run pyluxcoretool, it emits this relatively unhelpful error message:

C:\Users\Ben\Downloads\luxcorerender-v2.2-blender2.80-win64-opencl\luxcorerender-v2.2-blender2.80-win64-opencl
? pyluxcoretool console diamond.cfg
[MainThread][2019-12-01 18:41:00,669] LuxCore 2.2
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "pyluxcoretool.py", line 59, in <module>
  File "C:\Users\Ben\AppData\Local\Temp\_MEI112042\pyluxcoretools.zip\pyluxcoretools\pyluxcoreconsole\cmd.py", line 174, in main
  File "C:\Users\Ben\AppData\Local\Temp\_MEI112042\pyluxcoretools.zip\pyluxcoretools\pyluxcoreconsole\cmd.py", line 126, in LuxCoreConsole
RuntimeError: Syntax error in a Properties at line 1
[20124] Failed to execute script pyluxcoretool

I noticed when I evaluated the notebook that some warnings were thrown when generating diamond.scn, which I believe to be the problem:

In[35]:= sceneFile = 
 sceneConfig // luxcoreWriter // Export["diamond.scn", #, "String"] &

During evaluation of In[35]:= StringJoin::string: String expected at position 2 in scene.camera.lookat.orig = <>1<>7.<>2<>2<>(-7.)<>3<>3<>5.<>4.

During evaluation of In[35]:= StringJoin::string: String expected at position 3 in scene.camera.lookat.orig = <>1<>7.<>2<>2<>(-7.)<>3<>3<>5.<>4.

During evaluation of In[35]:= StringJoin::string: String expected at position 4 in scene.camera.lookat.orig = <>1<>7.<>2<>2<>(-7.)<>3<>3<>5.<>4.

During evaluation of In[35]:= General::stop: Further output of StringJoin::string will be suppressed during this calculation.

During evaluation of In[35]:= Part::partw: Part 2 of branch[#1[[1;;All,1,2]]&/*(ExportString[#1,RawJSON,Compact->0]&)/*StringReplace[{,-> ,[|]:>}],#1[[1,2]]&][{{{1,7.},2},{{2,-7.},3},{{3,5.},4}}] does not exist.

During evaluation of In[35]:= Part::partw: Part 2 of branch[#1[[1;;All,1,2]]&/*(ExportString[#1,RawJSON,Compact->0]&)/*StringReplace[{,-> ,[|]:>}],#1[[1,2]]&][{{{1,-0.2},5},{{2,0},6},{{3,-0.3},7}}] does not exist.

During evaluation of In[35]:= Part::partw: Part 2 of branch[#1[[1;;All,1,2]]&/*(ExportString[#1,RawJSON,Compact->0]&)/*StringReplace[{,-> ,[|]:>}],#1[[1,2]]&][{{{1,-3.80007},8},{{2,3.69452},9},{{3,10.0419},10}}] does not exist.

During evaluation of In[35]:= General::stop: Further output of Part::partw will be suppressed during this calculation.

Out[35]= "diamond.scn"

I'm not sure why this is throwing this error -- do you know what the issue is? This is running on Mathematica 12.0 and luxcorerender v2.2.

Thanks in advance!

Incredible! While I've used Mathematica a bit (at university) and LuxCoreRender since it was LuxRender, mathematically generating scenes with the flexibility this gives reminds me of Pov-Ray, except both the engine and scene generation are more powerful.

A tip for speed, using the Hybrid Backwards/Forwards path tracer will produce much faster results than Bi-Dir, while getting the same kind of results: https://forums.luxcorerender.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1187

Very cool! Thanks very much for sharing!!