You can get info about your Graphics card by using the menu item Tools->LightUp->OpenGL info.

This will open the Ruby console and print lots of info which can help indicate whether firstly you are actually using your graphics card at all, and secondly if its high enough spec.

Generally, ensuring you have updated drivers is a GoodThing(tm) not just for LightUp but Sketchup generally.

Also there was a time way back with SU3 when the difference in performance between "Use hardware acceleration" and not was pretty minimal. Nowadays thats not the case, and you'll find a much slicker workflow (irrespective of LightUp) by ensuring you're using your graphics card. To put it in perspective, a modern graphics card is at least as much computing power as your main PC. Not using it is turning your back on half your resources.

Adam

@earthmover said:

Just downloaded the demo. Anyone else had a chance to play with it yet? I keep getting bugsplats when I add a light to my scene. Anyone else?

Hi,

1. You must have "Use hardware acceleration" checked in Sketchup Preferences to use LightUp.

2. Are you getting any messages on the Ruby console when you press Tourtool?

3. Ensure you have updated graphics drivers for your computer.

You might try selecting the menu Tools->LightUp->Force Simple Rendering which limits LU to using very basic OpenGL functionality.

Adam

@pixero said:

I have found this to be better too, clients can find hypercosm or Su viewer very frustrating. Even though they always say, "Oh great, does this mean I can show people around the building myself", they often come back saying "You said that would be easy!".

LightUp has a Still capture mode that will produce 6 images of the current view which you can then simply point something like GoCubic.exe at to produce a Quicktime VR file that can be rotated around by the end user. Its a good compromise between file-size & simplicity.

(If I was allowed to upload quicktime .mov files, I'd post a sample)

Adam

Well I think he's made the point..

But the geology of the foreground rocks doesn't seem to match the mid/background, so "rendered".

(And sadly, I did do a zoom to find out if I could see a Solo signature hidden anywhere )

Well the DOM (document object model) of a HTML page is rooted from an instance of document and everything hangs off that.

If you have multiple WebDialogs, you have multiple DOMs, each with their own parts hierarchy which have names which are 'within' the scope of just that document.

So, Google "DOM" for more info, but its basically just a hierarchy of named & typed parts.

Adam

OK, so can you explain what you're trying to do? Perhaps there is a better way..

We did a 3dsmax plugin and some demos for PS2 but the lesson I learnt was you can't ask people to change their workflow lightly.

I should add that this is all done "on the fly" as the realtime polygons are rendered, not some model bloating process.

But frankly I'd use a parallax shader nowadays anyway. Not quite as good but you can do it on the GPU.

Adam

@thomthom said:

Such as SU bouncing focus back to toolwindows when you undo operations..? grumble

But thats correct behavior if I unwind an operation to just before the Tool was used..No?

Just becomes others are inconsistent doesn't mean you have to stoop to that too! You're better than that..

Adam

My 2 cents worth.

I think when you find yourself jumping through hoops to do stuff like this, you really need to question whether its a good idea.

Sketchup has a model of Choose a Tool, Do stuff with that tool, choose another tool... And I just feel you're asking for a world of pain if you start trying to break that design by reaching outside your scope and pinching key strokes from somebody else.

I know you can do it.. I just don't think its a good idea to do so.

I'll get my coat..

Adam

And rightly so. Its a basic tenet of UI design that users choose where to focus.

And I guess a corollary of that is you might ask yourself if this is the best approach.. ie don't let it become of feat of engineering and lose sight whether its such a hot idea to be pinging the focus automagically around..

Adam

About 10 years ago I worked on a technology I called "Geometric Textures". The idea was that you associate some geometry with a UV space and then model as normal using regular textures.

However, when you come to render, the UV coordinates for those regular textured faces are used to generate surface geometry to add true depth relief.

So as textured facade looks like this:

But gets rendered like this:

It didn't take the world by storm though. ;-(

Adam

Would closing the dialog work to transfer focus to the parent (SU) window?

@gaieus said:

Is that animation LightUp, Adam?
(I gotta try it once - I even have the "project" for it...)

Sure is.

The all new, all dancing v1.5 is hopefully out tomorrow too.
(Which is the version that has all this color/texture animation support)

Adam

[Displacement activities.. you gotta love em]

Here's a candle model I found on 3dwarehouse just now. Just added the flame and made the base shiny metal.

The flame is animated in realtime but I can't upload the .mov file so I've put a 320x240 on Vimeo
[flash=400,300:vcjxbftd]http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4710188[/flash:vcjxbftd]

Adam

@jim said:

Is there anything to watch for when using the Sketchup.write_default and Sketchup.read_default methods?

I know it is a pain if you are trying to store Windows paths in the registry, i.e.

> C;\Program Files\Google\Google Sketchup 7
> 

because the '' character is special in strings.

Is it a smart strategy to just encode (am i thinking of escape?) everything before it goes in? (and how might I do that?)

Yes, but Ruby 'knows' about unix forward slashes so I tend to always do a:

a_filepath_string.gsub(/(\)/, '/')

to everything regardless of platform which then works for PC & Mac.

Adam

I really think this is pretty straight forward to do in Ruby.

It really is one for Dr. C Fullmer (of countless cool plugins fame including Simple Loft), but I'll give it a go when I get a chance..

Adam

I'm sure with some artistic skill, Dynamic Components could make some cool animations. I was trying to get that thing in scifi movies of doors/shields that open in a "neat way".

[flash=400,300:2kg64dan]http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4666644[/flash:2kg64dan]

@thomthom said:

So I can only position the texture in a rectangle format? In this plugin I'm working on, viewtopic.php?f=180&t=18992, I currently allow it to fit to any face with four corners.

Kinda - I think it will only allow an affine projection, so you're out of luck there for a general 4 point positioning.

@adamb said:

So what you are saying is; you can skew and warp textures by using SU's UI, but doing so via the ruby API will cause instabilities?
(Or have it misunderstood this?)

No, I remember if you give degenerate positioning info (eg points repeated), SU dies.

But perhaps a better way of doing this is to use a PolyMesh and just explicitly set UVs.

Adam

I seem to remember position_material doesn't allow sheared UVs. You need to give it an orthogonal set of XYZ and UVs. I generally found it to be a little flakey too - if you give degenerate cases it will crash SU.

So I guess I would take an edge of your face cross face.normal to get an orthogonal frame into which you can project UVs to give to position_material.

Adam

@adamb said:

My real question here is: where in LU is the proxy plugin that give the right click "Replace with Proxy" command? If I can ever get LU to work, this proxy capability would be a handy tool since most of my models are "heavy".

Its part of LightUp v1.5 which out in a few weeks.

However, in LightUp you have always been able to place a Component with a definition called "XYZ**_proxy**" and LightUp will replace it with the Component Definition called "XYZ". I've just added an easy UI to the functionality for v1.5

Adam