@richard said:

@jim said:

The biggest challenge is identifying the geometry for a leaf. My first thought was that if the leaves all have a surface area that is similar, it could make finding them a lot easier - you could find them by area.

Can you post a sample skp of an imported tree?

Maybe we can get you half-way there, if not all the way.

Thanks for responding jim!

I can't load up an onyx tree due to the user agreement, though the same effect would be buy grabbing any SU tree with component leaves and exploding down to base geometry.

I would imagine the script would either search for alike areas or simply alike geometry. The script would only need to locate one similar face and then select all connected and replace!

I would imagine the script wouldn't be so hard to do but could be a great time saver where ever a model contains numerous instances of the same geometry.

My 0.02 of your earth pence worth...

Area might be a good key, you might also want to group connected geometry, find its OBB (oriented bounding box) and then match on that. And of course then you'd have the necessary local transform "for free" too!

The biggest problem is that processing geometry in Ruby is spectacularly slow and if you're going to be using dense geometry you might be waiting a long time.. Oh but you do raytracing don't you, so you're used to that.

Adam

@kwistenbiebel said:

That's cool....
I didn't even know you can make physical models with Sketchup.

Would that method (Stl) work as good for architectural scale models?

In principal yes, in practice no. It would be a pretty big (read: scary) milling machine!

Adam

@mariocha said:

@unknownuser said:

... that is a LightUp component called an Irradiance Cache. It is discussed in the getting started document.
Adam

In my humble opinion, the Getting started document would be much more easier to view as a seperate PDF file.
It would much less intefere with the flow of work.

Interesting and noted. Thankyou.

BTW If you want the pdf it lives on Windows at:

/Program Files/Google/Google SketchUp 6/Tools/lightup/GettingStarted.pdf

and on Mac OSX at:

/Library/Application Support/Google Sketchup 6/Sketchup/tools/lightup/GettingStarted.pdf

@edson said:

what happened to the lightup forum? even logged in i cannot seem to find it?

Edson, the LightUp website has a forum at http://www.light-up.co.uk/forum. Until we get the full version of LightUp out, I've not been able to devote as much time as I would like to it. But please feel free to post questions etc.

[And I haven't forgotten your request for a video showing exterior rendering in LightUp! ]

Adam

@mariocha said:

I did some tests.
To get rid of the psychedelic effect, I had to either explode groups, or make sure there are no groups in groups or modify the group, like add a line in the group.
Adding a line at universal level did not correct the problem with the group.
Also, (to contribute);
There is light behind the feet where there shoud not. The dog looks above the platform.

This is called "bleeding". Its because the platform continues under the feet of the dog so the interpolation incorrectly continues underneath too. You can fix it by changing the model to not go under the feet, also you can reduce it by increasing the Resolution of the lighting. I may add some code to LightUp to try and reduce the artefacts when it detects this.

@mariocha said:

Some faces of the "dog" are somewhat transparent; see the corner of the platform that should be hidden, for instance.
And edges appear somewhat chunkier then model really is. (maybe because of the unwanted transparancy)

The test model has 2 groups, the dog and the platform
The transparent effect is gone if I explode the group.

Yes, the demo has a few bugs related to groups/components. Probably simplest to avoid using them for now by exploding the model.

Adam

@ilay7k said:

Great!
Thanks
will be resolve feature for user with limited rights(non-admins...for windows)?
Ilya aka spirekin at your forum

Yes saw your post. I'm a bit unclear what the problem is here because LightUp isn't doing anything that requires special permissions. Its just some Ruby and some C++ running as a plug-in to Sketchup.

Any more info you can provide would be really appreciated. And I'll try and get a repro here.

Thanks.

I saw a pool of light coming down the stairwell onto the hallway floor the other day and caught myself wondering whether it was a rendering error.

Adam

@mariocha said:

This looks very promising Adam !!
What is the maximum face number in the present demo?

Hey thanks!

There isn't a hard limit in the demo. However, the demo has some crash bugs in it (now fixed internally), some incomplete features (eg support for Groups and Components which is now fixed internally) and more importantly used some Ruby methods to extract geometry information which is very slow.

It is this latter issue which means for larger models you have to wait an inordinate amount of time. We know how to fix this and it will be for the next released version.

Short answer is LightUp is aimed at large models.

Adam

Hi everyone,

I've been developing a plugin for SU called LightUp and I've had a handful of people that get Ruby errors on startup. It complains about "Slider" being redefined by LightUp. In all cases they had Physics installed and it was resolved by my moving the LightUp Slider class into a Module (as it should have been in the first place).

Any chance whoever is developing Physics could play nice and keep stuff inside a Module/namespace too so we avoid future clashes. (And I'm just presuming its Physics here because it seems to be the common element for this problem, but its got to be a GoodThing(tm) to do anyway.)

Adam

@lewiswadsworth said:

Anyone have the slightest idea what this warning means on SketchUp startup?

[attachment=0:31y361fk]<!-- ia0 -->Screenshot-1.png<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:31y361fk]

I should explain that (probably uniquely among SCF members) I sometime run SketchUp on Ubuntu Linux. Yep, it works just dandy if you tweak the WINE registry settings in a minor way...it just started working, quite suddenly, a few weeks ago with some major updates to Ubuntu and WINE. I'm told that Google has been contributing a great deal of code to the WINE runtime environment, which allows one to run Windows software on Linux (sometimes). Perhaps this is the result.

The only problem is that certain Rubies will not load properly...I get an error like this or else warnings about syntax. Usually it is completely inexplicable (sometimes syntax errors are indicated for commented lines!).

I strongly suspect that somehow there is something encoded in the rb text that is not properly interpreted. For instance, I had a number of syntax errors pop up with the subsmooth_loader.rb. I retyped it, word for word, with Ubuntu's equivalent of Notepad (Gedit), saved it, added the .rb file type, dropped it in the plugins folder...and it works fine now.

Your retyping stuff making it works makes me think it could be line-endings perhaps. You could check by finding a script that doesn't work and a version of the same that does and compare them. (eg: od -x file1.rb) to see whether it is just things that work end each line unix-style with 0x0d,0x0a (CR,LF) whereas Windows typically just has 0x0a.

(Kinda cool it works at all though!)
Adam

@al hart said:

I was just interested in:

1. Is it possible to access the sketchup database separately from multiple tasks in Ruby

Ruby doesn't 'do' concurrent tasks. So the answer is No!

Adam

Don't confuse the real threads within an Application and the Thread objects in Ruby. We're speaking of the latter here.

I could easily believe that SU has a bunch of threads doing stuff that if given the opportunity will be placed by the scheduler on different cores - hence the result you're seeing TBD. The original question was about leveraging cores from Ruby.

However, the broader issue of making SU use multi-core machines in a scaleable way (ie double the cores, roughly double the performance) is tricky because I suspect much of what SU does internally doesn't parallelize very well. Be interesting to know where the time in SU goes...

And the even broader issue is that in software engineering generally, we're still using the same old patterns for much of our codebases that simply doesn't fit well with a platform with many cores - much of what we do is very procedural - invoke a function, get an answer - which is just not how these platforms want to be driven. (They want more the flavor of here's 50 calls to that function and I'll pick up the answers sometime later).

How you gonna map SU to Larabee, Mr. Sketchup?

Adam

Yes, expected behaviour. A task will be farmed out to 'a core' - any core.

But you can't place processes on processors/cores and therefore you don't get true concurrency.

Adam

I think I'm right in saying that Ruby doesn't support placed processes/threads. ie Its threading is just a very simple scheduling within the process in which it was spawned. So you get no performance gain by threading within Ruby.

Adam

@unknownuser said:

Adam: SU5 doesn't have WebDialogs

Ah, ok sounds like you're out of luck, spadestick. I'll be watching closely to see if there is any demand for this though.

Adam

@spadestick said:

Thanks Adam for what looks like the future of Sketchup!

However, I'm can't get past this step... my setup, old iBook G4, OSX 10.3.9, sketchup ver5.

You'll think it'll run?

Thanks a million!

Well LightUp is for SketchUp 6 so its looking for a path on your Mac:

/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 6/SketchUp/tools

Its not finding it so indicates it cannot install.

What you could do is create that folder, let it rip and move the files manually. No idea whether it will work. It may be wholly incompatible with SU5. I have never tried this.

You would need to copy over from the "tools" folder, lightuptools.rb to your SU5 installation/tools and the entire folder called "lightup".

As I say, I've never tried this, I can think of many reason why it won't work. But let me/us know!

Adam

@unknownuser said:

Adam, good to see the info is of some use. I would imagine that the plugin would have to be fairly robust as there is bound to be a high number of polygons in some scenes it will be used on eventually. Most people using this plugin will be professionals, which leads me to conclude that the models won't be that simple or necessarily low poly.

No, I wasn't suggesting that. I was observing that when LightUp is tried on a "simple" model and takes 10 minutes then perhaps the model isn't as simple as you think! Or its a bug.

@unknownuser said:

I've had some SU instability issues with the demo of the plugin loaded, but it is understandable seeing that it is still in development stages.

Speaking of which, you know what you've done by releasing the demo? Created a HUGE anticipation. Now I can't wait for it to feature. I've also left a comment or two on the LightUp forum you've set up.

Can you PM me with some more info please. Platform, crashlogs would be great etc.

Well I'd be a liar if I said I'm not a bit apprehensive but I wouldn't have started this if I didn't believe its 1. its useful to people and 2. its do-able.

Adam

I'm really appreciating the feedback on LightUp (good and bad). Models that show up problems are especially welcome..

BTW I worked on a model this morning that was causing a user some problems. So I've identified some code I can really speed up which was the bottleneck. However, it showed up because a model of a small room with 500-700 faces had a plain dish/plate on a table - it had 21,000 faces in it! Yikes! Made me smile anyway.

Adam

@regis said:

Hi AdamB

I have this problem with LU when I apply a texture in my model.
[attachment=0:3i8h6f6m]<!-- ia0 -->pb LU.jpg<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:3i8h6f6m]

An idea ?

Cheers

Its a bug in the demo. (TBD came across it earlier too). Easiest solution is to regenerate the lighting by making a small change to the model (eg add a single line) that will cause LightUp to regenerate everything.

Adam

@edson said:

@adamb said:

The fact of the matter is that most people really don't care about the rendering detail - they just want something that improves the speed of their workflow and the range of their visualisation options.

adam,

what do you mean by not caring about the rendering detail? what rendering detail? could you elaborate a little bit on that?

i am not sure this helps you to understand the above but people like me --very interested in rendering but knowing very little about it-- do not really know exactly what LightUp can do for us.

So, what I'm saying is that based on the feedback I've got, most are concerned with "accessibility" of the technology, and not the low level "tweakability" of the technology. I think this is borne out by Podium's popularity and on the flipside things like Sunflow which is a great renderer but not very user-friendly wrt SU - thus largely ignored.

@edson said:

i must confess i do not understand fully what LU can do for me. can it help me with my exteriors scenes? yes? please show me how. what about interiors? let me see more examples. and so on. this is why i have been asking for more videos and tutorials.

i hope this is useful feedback for you.
[/quote]

All feedback is useful, Edson. And I really appreciate you taking the time. Sure LightUp can do exterior scenes. I will upload a video RSN. I've found some some graphics card incompatibilities in the demo subsequently that may trip you up. But hopefully not. And LightUp is also useful from a straight touring large worlds pov because its rendering is very significantly faster than the straight SU rendering (which has to deal with lots of stuff LightUp can ignore).

Adam