@efrado said:

I do not if you get the same image that I did in my computer ,I mean,I only saw the plain drawing without illumination

Thanks for the model. Sounds like a bug I need to look into and fix.

Cheers,
Adam

@unknownuser said:

on knees, praying
Please have them sort out what they need to so it can get to market.
done praying

We've had a ton of feedback in this one week. Its been really useful - and LightUp needs to address those issues. 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. I'll have to put my hand up and admit I was surprised by how strong that sentiment is.

Where we're up to right now is focussing on nailing these crash bugs, simplifying the UI because many reported finding the Ambient Occlusion/Direct Lighting/Tourtool buttons confusing, improving performance generally and closing out useability issues like groups, group materials etc.

So, models that cause reproducible hangs/crashes/slowness are like gold for helping in these tasks. Hint, hint!

Adam

BTW The first pass at simplification of GUI got committed this morning. Basically you specify Lighting in Preferences and then hit Tour and it does what it needs to do. So now only 3 buttons: Preferences, Query and Tour.

@pmiller said:

For all those who are unable to unzip* the file (blocked), is there any chance of a new zip file?

*despite using properties to unblock. BTY this zip file is the first I have ever encountered that will not unzip.

Yes, mail "help at light-up.co.uk" with your reg details and I'll flip some bits.

[FWIW Its just a regular zipfile. No, really it is!]

Adam

@edson said:

@efrado said:

:? I reproduced the steps shown in the video tutorial but what I get is a white screen.
what I am doing Wrong?

have you tried reversing faces?

LightUp only draws front faces so Edson is right, checking your faces are the correct way and/or fly around the model to check they're not facing the opposite way you expected!

You might also set a non-white background to be sure its not white materials on a white background rather than not drawing anything.

Although they will be fixed, right now LightUp has problems with:

• groups of groups
• components inside components
• Instance/Group materials
• Highly tessellated geometry.

Adam

@efrado said:

Hi Edson,Yes I always check that,

I wonder if it could be a graphic processor problem?

I use a tablet PC with GP Intel(R)

thanks

Might be. You could try Tools->LightUp->Force Simple Rendering, then restart to pick up the change.

Adam

@edson said:

adam,

thank you for your patience. fake emitters understood. i went back to the skippy and played some with it.

as for the Irradiance Cache, understood in theory . i have yet to see it in action to fully grasp the idea.

regards.

I'm planning a video tutorial very soon.

Adam

@efrado said:

PLEASE HELP!
I just registered trying to downloud this MARVELOUS plugin from AdamB,but unfortunately the compressed file does not appear.what do I must do?

0. After you've registered an email is sent to you.
1. You need to click on the link in the email LightUp sent to activate your registration.
2. You then login and go to the download page to download the demo.

Adam

@edson said:

adam,

two questions:

@unknownuser said:

Also by default any material whose name begins with “$” will be skipped
when calculating lighting so they will be displayed at full brightness all the
time. This is useful to create fake emitters.
(from getting started with lightup)

this must sound like a dumb request, but would you care to elaborate on the above? i do not understand what you mean by it. and what would be a fake emitter in LUp's sense?

and secondly, what is this component for?
[attachment=0:2yb9c0ua]<!-- ia0 -->LU_compo.png<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:2yb9c0ua]

Fair point, "fake emitter" is a bit confusing. What I mean is that a face with a material beginning with '$' will be always full brightness as if it is self illuminating like a real area emitter. This is useful sometimes when you want something to look like a bright light but not actually emit light. I posted studio2.skp a day or so ago; the windows at the back of the room are bright white "fake emitters"; they come out bright white but add no lighting to the room.

Secondly, that is a LightUp component called an Irradiance Cache. It is discussed in the getting started document. Basically, you place these in your model to hint to LightUp where reflective surfaces can get there reflection information. It is a method getting fast reflections during the Tour tool mode.

Adam

@edson said:

@max_b said:

After I made a "clean unused components" in one file, I no longer see point light component in the material palette (nor the cache). Even after SU restart and LU reinstall.
They both are there, i can click on white place holders and add them. Just they don't show up.
How can I get the icons back?

i had the same problem. my solution was to dump the plugin and reinstall it. the icons came back for a while but then disappeared again.?????

LightUp adds its built-in Components each time a document is opened or created. There are times when the icon disappears but (as you say) the component is still there and useable. I don't know why this happens.

Adam

@unknownuser said:

Thanks for the tuts Adam, as a matter of note, the RSS feed I have bookmarked for your site fails to load, has been for a couple of days.

Fixed. Thanks for pointing it out!

@jclements said:

Neophyte question.

I seems that Area lights and Spot lights are similar. What is the difference between the two?

LightUp doesn't have spotlights per se. It has Point Lights that radiant evenly in every direction, and Area Lights which radiant in a "spread angle" around the face direction (eg 90 degrees means radiant in a hemisphere). So you can create "spot faces" (aka spotlights) simply by giving an area light a small spread angle and big power. I tend to wrap light sources into components just for ease of use.

Adam

@unknownuser said:

Thanks for the tuts Adam, as a matter of note, the RSS feed I have bookmarked for your site fails to load, has been for a couple of days.

I'll look into it.

@unknownuser said:

Adam, any chance your LightUp application/plugin will be compatible with Podium (application/plugin by TBD)?

I think it will be quite useful if I can set up the scenes in SU, check them out and have pre-vis and later, once modeling is all done, render it in Podium without having to redo the lighting.

Well I did add some Podium support after speaking with TBD. It used to pick up Light Power from the face attributes (BTW it picks up some Kerky attributes too). But then just before I posted the demo I saw that Podium 2.0 is dropping per face attributes so I pulled it to stop a mass of confusion.

Adam

@unknownuser said:

Adam: thanks for the video tuts.
you can even do psychedelic renders

later edit: get some crashes (when freeing memory after writing .luca files)

Hmm.. You get that when the LightUp has stale data wrt SketchUp. It shouldn't happen of course and I'm working on a fix. One way of forcing a resync of LightUp is to add a single line to the model somewhere. It won't show in LightUp but does trigger a rebuild because the model is considered "changed". I know, its ugly!

[Useless info #1. They're called luca files because I was writing the code with Luca (my son on my knee) and he wanted something named after him - and "LightUp Cache files" kinda fitted!]

A couple of video tutorials to get people started using LightUp.

The first shows how to set up a Point Light source and is available
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtyj40CS6tg

The second shows how to set up Area Light sources and is here http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=EhpRDCqbGA4

@burkhard said:

Hi Adam, I made a mistake with the licence key 0 and O. Where can I get the second chance? I can't find the new registration field.
Edit Solved.

Just for future reference. In menu Tools->LightUp->Reset Registration Key then Quit Sketchup.

Adam

@unknownuser said:

@unknownuser said:

Can you explain. "Use sun" is selected by default. If you turn it off, LightUp shouldn't use the Sun.

aha, I thought that it takes in account "display shadows" from SU. didn't saw the "Use sun" from preferences window.

why not use the "display shadows" ? more intuitive imho

Well possibly. Its an interesting one because I think the dynamic for Podium is slightly different. I've found myself often not having shadows in SU but wanting sunlight shading in LU as a flick between the two. For Podium you want to compose the view "just so" and press the big green button and demand you get the same settings as in SU.

In any case, its a 1 line change to check LUprefs or the SU rendering_options.

Adam

@jim said:

Yes, but the problem goes away if I clear the Plugins folder, and load only this code.

I don't understand how the scope is the reason. If that were so, wouldn't many other plugins go out of scope and not work?

Sure, but in doing so you're changing the character of garbage collection.

My hunch (based on nothing) is that the schema handler stuff (ie skp:blah) just expects the dialog to stay in scope although its an asynchronous process. Your code exits the block and does other stuff, 256 opcodes later (yes, I saw it in the Ruby source code - ouch!) the GC kicks in and sweeps it away. The javascript side then gets its knickers in a twist because the Ruby side dialog that was consuming data has disappeared.

Adam

@unknownuser said:

I get this error message when I press the LightUp prefences button.
[attachment=0:2jd7eubv]<!-- ia0 -->lightup preferences error dialog.JPG<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:2jd7eubv]
If you press "yes" you can continue onto the settings window, but supersampling cannot be enabled.

Its something to do with Explorer that I've yet to entirely track down.

If you get this a lot, you can reset the Preferences for a model from Ruby Console. Type:

LMap.resetprefs

@unknownuser said:

feedback:

• model that is in the manual should be added to get on track easily

Yes, for the actual release there will be examples, videos etc.

@unknownuser said:

• output bug: see attached (happened several times, cannot duplicate)
• better icons (too much antialias when Larg Icons is set)

I have had some OpenGL drivers create odd snapshots. Try adjusting the size of the window (which will in turn change the size of the output size.)

@unknownuser said:

• a way to disable the debug text from Ruby console

Yep, I plan to. Left it in for now since it doesn't do much harm. But yes I agree.

@unknownuser said:

• in direct lighting do not apply sun if it is not selected

Can you explain. "Use sun" is selected by default. If you turn it off, LightUp shouldn't use the Sun.

@unknownuser said:

ideas:

• overlay on top of SU output with custom opacity - to have the lines visible

Hmm. I have the greatest respect for the SU developers, but there OpenGL backend is the slowest thing I have ever seen. I don't know what goes on behind the scenes, but anything I can do to get as far away from it is going to help performance. If there is real call for lines - I'll draw 'em!

@unknownuser said:

nice work Adam

Thank you. Fair amount of work to do yet!

Adam

@unknownuser said:

Juju: supersampling is not available in this version

Correct! And I have a question mark as to its usefulness too. Currently its a rotating multi-tap kernel but I'm thinking you might as well just turn up the Resolution of the lighting to achieve much the same effect.

Adam