It began as LuxRender in 2008 before changing its name to LuxCoreRender in 2017 as part of a project reboot.

[8] A significant feature of LuxCoreRender is that the user is able to change the balance of different lights while the image is still being processed.

[11] Although very capable and well-structured, PBRT focuses on academic use and was not easily usable by digital artists.

The plan for LuxRender 2.0 was defined during the 2013 summer and one of the major components is a new engine based on the C++ and Python APIs.

It offers all the features shown by SLG (SmallLuxGPU),[13] including a dynamic camera, texture, material, and object editing, and more.

However the "v2.0" is there to re-mark the continuity with 10 years of development and experience.During the 2017 winter, LuxCoreRender 2.0 was defined as a LuxCore API focused render package, dropping any old code related to LuxRender 1.x.