LightUp shows you the photometric mesh interactively and has a built-in IES file browser. You can download a free demo.

[flash=640,432:2wrvj5m7]http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=13653813[/flash:2wrvj5m7]

@thomthom said:

Ok, so:

select_tool + pop_tool = fubar
but
push_tool + pop_tool = OK

Thought I'd tried pop_tool with select_tool before - without pop_tool doing anything. Thought it only worked after push_tool.

Not quite. select_tool + pop_tool = fubar isn't always terminal. Just apparently if there are really large toolbars around hence its never caused a problem for me in the past.

Thomthom, can you get Jims' Organiser thing and see if you can repro this.

Ok, it appears to be that if you select_tool but then pop_tool, things can get fubar.

Mostly its benign - hence I got away with it - but with the LargeToolSet showing from Jim's Tool Organizer, the additional calls to the validation procs reveal the error. In that it is wrong to be selecting a tool then popping it, but you might hope SU would just ignore it.

The attached Ruby is a simple Tool that always performs pop_tool on keypress Escape.

It can be invoked either by calling "baddoit()" which starts it using select_tool, or by calling "evian()" which starts it using push_tool.

poptool.rb

@adamb said:

Yes, I can confirm its a repeatable bug on Mac OSX SketchUp 8.

I've logged a very grumpy bug report with Google.

Useful to know you can stop the crash by saving before exiting, but I am disappointed a bug like this could be missed. I know software has bugs in it etc, but this seems like any basic regression testing / smoke testing would flush this one out.

After I'm done with a Tool, I always done .pop_tool rather than .select_tool(nil) because it seems less presumptuous. ie restore what the user was doing before rather than cancel their previous selection.

However, Gaieus found out a problem/conflict with Jim Toolbar Organizer - long story short, I've switched to doing select_tool(nil) to avoid some weird race-condition with menu validation procs.

But it seems to have cured the crash on exit of SU8 on Mac when using Observers as well...

Adam

Had another look at this, this morning.

There doesn't seem to be any way of setting the Layer properties, the COM API just doesn't offer that functionality.

Adam

@thomthom said:

Was it via the COM interface you managed to get the layer material?

Yep. BTW You can get the Layer color etc but there doesn't exist an actual Material..

And here's a Windows build of it. Same method name etc

Texwriter.so.zip

Thanks! Glad you like it.

People still struggle to get their heads around LightUp as it is a bit different from other viz software, but we're getting there!

@thomthom said:

:thumb:
Neato!
I noticed there was animation options there - is the animation support just the native SU scene change? Or is there other, better animation support? I've never made animations in SU due to the jerky camera movements - but it'd be great to have a tool like LightUp along with some proper animation paths for visualizations tours.

No its just triggers the Scene animations immediately to start recording so you can rerun multiple movie renderings with different lighting rigs and then easily blend them together.

There isn't anything intrinsically wrong with Scenes, its just there are no tools for authoring/editing a set of Scenes. I know Chris Fullmer has done some stuff, and I released my "SceneTweaker" which allows you to easily re-orient scenes after you've created them, but nobody has produced a solid Animation Rigging Tool. I suspect because its a lot of work with little reward in it because its not seen as sexy.

It has to use C/C++ to talk to the abortion that is COM

Did a quick test on a Mac and it works fine and doesn't add any Undo transactions.

require "Texwriter.bundle"
a_material.dumptexture("/dodah.jpg")

Texwriter.bundle.zip

JD, I think you've got to bite the bullet and use the COM interface to get the ISkpMaterial, then extract a ISkpTexture on which you can call WriteToFile().

On a related note, anyone else experience that TextureWriter is stupidly slow for large images? ie a model has a 2000x1000 bmp texture and Texturewriter can take minutes to write it out.

[flash=640,480:3is2f1hc]http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=15776010[/flash:3is2f1hc]

Nice catch Chris. Forgot about that thread - just hope he's the right guy.

Just for the record..

On Mac, onRButtonUp doesn't get called apart from for a simple down-up click event. However, onRButtonDoubleClick gets called instead.. so just stick your code in there and things work.

[Appreciated the super fast response from the Google Team]

Hi,

There appears to be a bug in the Maxwell SketchUp plugin. Essentially it presumes that no other plugin will be firings its Observers it sets up as SketchUp starts up - obviously not a great assumption. (Also if you turn on $DEBUG, Ruby complains about a few uninitialized instance variables as the maxwell plugin loads which is probably not ideal.)

Anyone know how to contact the authors?

Adam

ok, I've logged a bug with Google. Seems its just a Mac thing.

onRButtonUp only gets called if the mouse doesn't move, whereas onLButtonUp gets called when the mouse button is released regardless of whether the mouse has moved.

` class ButtonTest

def initialize
	puts "started"
end

def onLButtonDown(flags, x, y, view)
	puts "onLButtonDown"
end
def onLButtonUp(flags, x, y, view)
	puts "onLButtonUp"
end

def onRButtonDown(flags, x, y, view)
	puts "onRButtonDown"
end
def onRButtonUp(flags, x, y, view)
	puts "onRButtonUp"
end

end

Sketchup.active_model.select_tool ButtonTest.new`

Lots of new features and improvements in this release - the diffuse color bleeding is pretty neat, as is the 'shadow catcher' materials.

Users can upgrade from the website: http://www.light-up.co.uk
There is a new free demo to download if you want to give it a try.

Changes for v1.10a

• New Material attribute "Shadow Catcher" for creating realistic dropshadows on your skybox background

• New control to set Fresnel color on materials, so color can change based on viewing angle.

• New Ambient Occlusion shader supports color bleeding between surfaces

• Being able to set "Autoplay" on exported LightUp Player files

• Automatic triggering of Scene animation during Movie recording

• Realtime rotation of Skybox in Tourtool (Alt+Drag left/right)

• Added ability change FOV while inside Tourtool (Alt+Drag up/down)

• Added show Cropping for standard ratios while inside Tourtool, to allow accurate framing

• Added Bloom cutoff for better control of bloom

• Honors "Use Hidden" for IrrCache also

• Reads VTF texture file format

• Fixes for stability of IES photometric light file handling

• Fixed IES light aiming when embedded in Components and/or scaled.

• Light aiming uses SketchUp inferencing

• Improved Rayleigh sunlight model

• Fixed problem of resetting bumpmap files on materials

• Fixed problem of getting dark marks on some surfaces

• Reduced noise in Ambient Occlusion shading

• Fixed problem with binding wrong Irrcaches

• Fixed reading of different skybox formats

• Fixed problem with handling skinny faces

• Fixed UV animation on shiney surfaces

• Fixed FBX export handling of empty Groups

• Improved Bloom cutoff algorithm

• Fixed text input in dialogs jumping cursor to end of text

• Much better IBL sampling quality

• Better load balancing on multiple threads

• Allow larger HDR skybox generation

Ran it through LightUp - 25 minutes lighting time. (btw quality piece of modelling work)

And for those who want to wander around the lit model using the new LightUp Player:

Site Unavailable

(www.light-up.co.uk)

(You'll need to download the PC / Mac player first from here http://www.light-up.co.uk/player/)

@thomthom said:

I did that for Vertex Tools, I take the average normal of the faces connected to the vertex.

You're missing a step with your averaging there. You need to weight by the contribution each face connected to the vertex makes - ie weight by the interior angle otherwise a cube constructed of triangles will end up with vertex normals not all pointing out exactly at 45 degrees.

@earthmover said:

Anyone else finding Sketchup 8 to be very slow at mesh selection? I first noticed while selecting terrains and didn't give it much thought, but I kept finding it SU would hang when picking just "surface" area...which is odd. I decided to do some tests with SU 7.1 and SU 8. Huge difference!!

I edited the video to cut out some of the waiting for SU8 to process. Basically what took SU 7.1 a few seconds to select, took SU8 three minutes to select!

You may be right but its a bit surprising SU8 would be so much slower. The first thing I'd check is that you don't have a Ruby script that is watching each and every Selection you make and slowing everything down.

Adam

@thomthom said:

But does it provide an overhead for a task such as rendering?

Its a hardware feature. There isn't any cost to speak of.

However, if you're maxed out on floatingpoint, then no amount of multithreading will help you. Indeed, there is a cost associated with scheduling, running and generally managing a thread, but this is down to how efficient you OS is at switching threads and any overhead your Application introduces in splitting a task amongst N threads.

Traditionally, Windows has been poor at thread switching - so much so they introduced yet-another-concept called a "Fiber" (geddit!) which was meant to be a fast context switching object.. which was what a Thread was meant to be in the first place. slaps head.

And your renderer will have a fixed cost associated with each additional thread it brings to the rendering task.

These 2 things conspire to make for a non-simple answer.. ;-(

Adam