Creating Neon light effects using realtime Bloom and material emitters: http://www.light-up.co.uk/index.php?t=tips

Thanks everyone.

LightUp bakes "view independent" lighting offline, and calculates "view dependent" effects in realtime.

That essentially means diffuse light effects are calculated once and cached, and specular effects are calculated on the GPU. This allows unlimited numbers of lights with shadows while still having 30 frames/second motion.

Here's a realtime capture of SketchUp running LightUp - but the youtube vid has dropped the frame rate from its normal 30 frames/sec

[flash=800,600:3mj7y6fe]http://www.youtube.com/v/czBsvJ_cG_k[/flash:3mj7y6fe]

Inspired by the beautiful image posted by Speaker the other day (http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=333&t=41281), I had a go recreating the model in SketchUp.

Lighting time for both is under 3 minutes, images straight out of LightUp.

@fossa said:

Here is the link to youtube

thanks for looking at it. In particular the trees flicker almost all the time, but at about 0:40 thru 1:30 it gets really bad with things flashing.

I'm on the most current release of SU, and have done many animations before without this problem.

Looks like z-fighting to me. Check you don't have 2 instances of tree on top of each other in the same position.

So check the ComponentInstances and that you haven't messed the Definitions.

Finally got LightUp v2.3g out the door so I've been playing with some rendering! Yeah.

Sketchup model (from Infinite Reality), lit with LightUp using a HDR image-based lighting and realtime DOF.

Very WIP, but quite pleased so far.
I'm amazed how tricky it is to control the uncanny valley effect of stuff like this.

Just lighting:

And the model in sketchup:

I have nothing to add other than Chris's avatar image makes me feel distinctly unwell.

Ruby has "green threads" which is simply the Ruby interpreter locally slicing & dicing its own execution thread. But since the Ruby intepreter itself is being scheduled from the runloop of SketchUp, its of little use for asyncronous work.

However, you can create as many real Processes / Threads / Fibres as you like using C - but you can't talk to the SketchUp API with them because its not designed for this (not thread-safe). You can only make calls into SketchUp from the execution thread that is called from Sketchup.

So kicking off a process that does a blocking read on a socket is fine. But you'll have to have a protocol for getting the data back into the scope of your C Extension - probably by periodically polling to see if the worker thread is done.

For my money, integrating libCURL seems nuts. Just spawn a shell command to run wget or curl and stick it in a file somewhere.

Thats pretty cool. Its it it much slower?

Just FYI, I test LightUp raytests in a mode that gives realtime raytracing of your scene as you look around!

Adam

@unknownuser said:

Why don't you try UV Tools and RoadKll (is easy and is free) ?

Thanks, but I'm looking for a modelling tool inside SketchUp, not an Application to export to.

I think Thomthom's tool sounds what I want

Adam

@thomthom said:

Oh wait, I think I misunderstood you. I thought you meant non-planar quad - but re-reading it I take it you mean something a little more complex.

I think what comes closest is my Bezier Surface plugin (under development).

yes, thats what I mean.

It really surprised me that something that appeared so simple is completely unhandled by SketchUp. I lost 1+ hours yesterday f-ing about with Projected / non-projected texture modes.. But basically gave up and use faceted geometry.

Also tried Chris Fullmer's shape blender but it ignores UVs

Your new plugin sounds like it will do what I wanted.. c'est la vie

@bravoddb said:

@sepo said:

great update Adam.

I have tryed but it crashes whith HD sun.Also it stops working when the light bulb image box comes out, it never disapears ( the light bulb image boc).
I just installed the 2.3e version.

Great plugin

Hi,

LightUp makes heavy use of your GPU, so make sure you have updated OpenGL drivers.
Happy to step through with you to identify the problem. If you email help@light-up.co.uk, we can take it from there.

Adam

New tutorial on using Dynamic Components to quickly lay out large arrays of lights in SU.

Read it here!

Are there any plugins for mapping a texture onto a flattish shape bounded by 4 curves. ie its kind of a quad but the sides are curved.

Sure somebody must have done this..

Adam

Guys, guys

Its a 100 lines of Ruby that manages to do image file writing, blurry depth of field, a point light and multiple materials!
How on earth do you think it would be a full raytracer!

However, if you're interested in raytracing, its very simple and you can play around with it to learn about this area of graphics.

The G[] array contains a Bitmap of 32x10 stored as 10 integers.

In function T(), I test the primary ray against an infinite plane and if hit return position+surface normal+materialID (Line 36).
I run through each bit of the bitmap and where this is '1' bits, I trace a reflective Sphere returning a surface position+normal+materiaID. (Line 54)

The Scene function S(), traces the primary ray into the scene (Line 70) and colors the pixels depending on material m, and a single pointlight (Line 77). Try changing the position of the light.

The color for the infinite plane is chosen based on a mod function of position. Line 83 controls the scale of chequers.

The main function "raytrace" starts at line 93 and takes care of generating primary rays, and writing out an PPM image file.

Adam

A new version of LightUp is available in free demo and retail form (PC and Mac)

• Anisotropic texture support (much sharper looking textures)
• Improved realtime performance
• More robust handling of user input
• Fixed some precision issues
• Fixes to FBX exporter with name clashes
• Fixes to handling masked textures
• Improved IrrCache binding
• Dialogs persist their last position between sessions

http://light-up.co.uk

Adam

Un-retouched screen capture below shows the sharper lighting effects ("Solo inspired"!)

Because I evidently have waay too much time on my hands, I offer for your delectation...

A pure Ruby raytracer

It has Depth-of-field (using jittered samples), 3 fixed materials, (sky, checkerboard and chrome) and font rendering - of sorts!

There are a couple of constants you can edit:

REZ for image size
SAMPLES for number of jittered samples per pixel

(I started from a micro raytracer written in C and transmogrified it into our chosen language and twiddled it a bit.)

Enjoy - Thea will be quaking in their boots.

raytrace.rb

@jgb said:

What irks me most about plugins in general is there is no consistency or logic to where their controls go… rt-click, plugin menu, own toolbar (somewhere on the screen) or buried in some other menu item.

SU needs a menu item or plugin (the irony does not escape me) that lists all plugins and where to find their controls. While we are at it include the authors name in that list. Many a time I need to ask here a question/pose a problem and I gotta open the script to see who wrote it.

Open SketchUp Preferences->Extensions and click on the plugin name to get a short description and info about author/company etc.

Adam

@mitcorb said:

Hi, AdamB:
Thanks for those links. They are very informative.
Some other links to ponder:
Wikipedia has this article for comparison of Nvidia cards:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=comparison%20of%20gpus&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FComparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units&ei=4tOtTu-BLcKisQKT-ZzjDg&usg=AFQjCNGGv-idLJVharlpP65q_w8HyTK4vA&cad=rja

There is a similar one for AMD:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=comparison%20of%20gpus&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CC4QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FComparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units&ei=4tOtTu-BLcKisQKT-ZzjDg&usg=AFQjCNGmzCrvn2H1U4AQOJwdUxCXjb8cGw&cad=rja

Thanks - saw the wikipedia ones too but they are very technical. I liked the simple ranking of videobenchmarks.net so users can quickly get a feel for where their current graphics card sits in the big scheme of things.

I recently had had somebody go off in a bit of a huff because I pointed out they had this graphics card that - as Gaieus says - is fine for Facebook etc, but just not fine for serious graphics work. So rather than shoot the messenger (me), now I can point them at this.

@tfdesign said:

I'd be interested to know how the Intel HD Graphics 3000 chipset weighs up, as I was thinking about getting a Macbook Air with an Intel i7 processor. Interestingly, the previous graphic chipset in the Air was the Nvidia GeForce 320M, which although is more of a gaming chipset, is no slouch either (or I am told).

Its a strange myth about "gaming chipsets". There really is no such thing - the only deal is whether they have OpenGL drivers (rather than just DirectX which most games use to access the graphics chip).

And the slight irony, is most games today use much higher precision graphics (such as floating point framebuffers) than CAD packages.

Adam

I often come across SketchUp users that buy a new PC with a "built-in" Intel Graphics chip and are disappointed to find that these "free" graphics chip are priced like this for a reason.

Here's a handy website to check performance of different graphics chips. Not SketchUp specific but should help avoid those really lame graphics chips that stores try and slip to you. And interesting to see just how atrocious these Intel graphics chips are compared to Nvidia/AMD/etc.

PassMark Software - Video Card (GPU) Benchmark Charts

Video Card Benchmarks - Over 1 Million Video Cards and 1200 Models Benchmarked and compared graphically - Updated with new system benchmarks daily!

(www.videocardbenchmark.net)

PassMark Videocard Benchmarks - Common Videocards

(www.videocardbenchmark.net)

Adam

LightUp Player and WebPlayer have all been updated to v2.7.0.0 for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer.

I've attached the standalone Windows Player and Mac Player as they're only a few hundred kbytes.
NB Both are digitally signed for your security (ie they cannot be tampered with).

If you prefer web browser based 3D, then you can point your browser here:
http://www.light-up.co.uk/index.php?t=story&p=100

Some other example luca files can be found here:
http://lightup4sketchup.com/resources/webplayer/candleflame.luca
http://lightup4sketchup.com/resources/webplayer/wharehouse2.luca

And of course you can export your lit Sketchup models into luca files..

Adam

LightUp_Player_Win.zip

LightUp_Player_Mac.zip