@edson said:

@adamb said:

@mike lucey said:

I will be posting some video tutorials. Any suggestions as to areas that would benefit most, would be much appreciated.

AdamB

adam,

no problems whatsoever downloading and installing LightUp in my mac.

i have started playing with it but, being a novice at rendering in general, it would be great to have a couple of tutorials or videos demonstrating a typical workflow. this will certainly allow us to make the best of LightUp.

a question: the time limit of 30 minutes means that everytime i open SU i have 30 min to use LU? what if a render takes more than that? if i am misunderstanding this please enlighten me.

it is difficult to navigate within the studio skippy you posted as there are no scenes set up. if one makes any false move the only way to get back to the scene is close and reopen the file.

congratulations on your effort.

Generally LightUp rendering is pretty quick (obviously it depends on the model complexity) so 30 minutes seemed reasonable to give people a go with the technology to see if its useful to them. I've certainly added onto the TODO list something to allow you to quit from rendering if its taking too long - or there's a bug causing LightUp to spin endlessly.

As to getting lost in studio2.skp Yes, it was modelled with no scale in mind hence the crazy dimensions. However, you can control the speed of the camera motion in LightUp from the Preferences dialog. In "Viewing" look for "Speed". Also, if you ever get lost anywhere in Sketchup, Apple/Ctrl-1 to reset the camera position is always helpful.

Adam

@ronanr said:

@adamb said:

@jclements said:

I downloaded the zip file, went to its properties and unblocked it, but still couldn't extract the contents without the Windows Block Content dialog.

Sounds like you have a virus-checker stopping the installation. Perhaps you should install elsewhere and move the files manually.

No, its Windows 'deciding' the content can be harmful... my Norton AV passes your zip file as clean... Perhaps the ability to download the installer Unzipped from Light-up.co.uk would help some people with the same problem? Just a thought.

Its the .msi file that is causing problems for JClements I believe so I'm not sure that would help.

I think there is bound to be a "learning experience" for me about the best way of packaging and downloading this stuff for minimal aggravation over the coming weeks!

@whaat said:

I had this problem until I made my web dialog objects global.

I could totally believe thats the problem. ie Ruby (correctly) garbage collects when it goes out of scope.

@mike lucey said:

Thanks Adam, everything opened fine. I've printed the instructions
and will read and have go tomorrow.

I really like the icons and way you have presented the package. Do
you use a Mac by any chance?

Mike

PS: Maybe you have done this already, I haven't checked on the forum.
Is there a Video Tutorial available showing a step by step approach?

Thank you. Yes, I regularly use Macs and PCs though my main machine is a G5 Mac.

I will be posting some video tutorials. Any suggestions as to areas that would benefit most, would be much appreciated.

AdamB

@ilay7k said:

Adam what about if somebody made scene and configured lightUp's options, and remotely sent to other...how to start rendering?
for example your studio-file, i open and what i do to start simulation? when i push TourTool and there is no actions...then add AO and push TT, it works fine

The lighting options etc are all stored with the .skp file so sending it to somebody else will retain that info. The lighting data is created locally and NOT currently saved with the skp file.

The TourTool checks to see whether you've created lighting data and only starts if you have. So creating either Ambient Occlusion or Direct lighting (or both!) will then allow TourToool to start.

Adam

@jclements said:

I downloaded the zip file, went to its properties and unblocked it, but still couldn't extract the contents without the Windows Block Content dialog.

Sounds like you have a virus-checker stopping the installation. Perhaps you should install elsewhere and move the files manually.

@daniel s said:

:?
I must be doing something wrong..
can you post a .skp example like the ones you use to make the images on your web Adam?

Daniel S

There you go.

studio2.skp

I've put the LightUp Demo for PC and Macintosh on the website. http://www.light-up.co.uk

With great trepidation, I invite you all to give it a whirl. Please read the GettingStarted.pdf

Now where the hell is that corkscrew!

Adam

Sure you could use grep, sed etc but wait, what if we had a scripting language in Sketchup that had good file reading capability, powerful regular expression matching, and a binding to the Sketchup geometry API etc.

I guess we can only hope.

Seriously, something like this works fine:

IO.foreach("my_inputfile.ext") { |aline|

        /^(\S*) ([^$]*)/.match(aline)
        verb = $1
        rest = $2
        case verb

        ....whatever you need to do here eg entities.add_face, entities.add_group etc
}

This is my mickey mouse .obj importer I use for Sketchup:

pos = []
tex = []
group = nil

IO.foreach("/tmp/test.obj") { |aline|

        /^(\S*) ([^$]*)/.match(aline)

        verb = $1
        rest = $2
        case verb
                when "s"
                        # ignore smoothing group
                when "v"
                        # close current group
                        if group
                                pos = []
                                tex = []
                                group = nil
                        end
                        / (\S*) (\S*) (\S*)/.match(rest)
                        pos.push Geom;;Point3d.new($1.to_f,$2.to_f,$3.to_f)
                when "f"
                        if /(\S*)\/(\S*) (\S*)\/(\S*) (\S*)\/(\S*)/.match(rest)
                                vertices = [pos[$1.to_i], pos[$3.to_i], pos[$5.to_i]]
                        elsif /(\S*) (\S*) (\S*)/.match(rest)
                                vertices = [pos[$1.to_i], pos[$2.to_i], pos[$3.to_i]]
                        end
                        group.entities.add_face vertices
                when "g"
                        # open a new group
                        /(\S*)/.match(rest)
                        group = Sketchup.active_model.entities.add_group
                        group.name = $1
                        puts "group(#{$1})"
        end
}

Adam

Well given its one of your countrymen building the webtech, I wouldn't be surprised!

Adam

@jenujacob said:

adam! this is great! cant wait!
one small thing.. i hope u update those images in ur site with higher res ones... those images now have some serious AA problems.. it might turn off a lot of ppl!

Yes, I should explain on the website those are all just screenshots from a tour of the model - ie running at 30Hz. LightUp can generate 9000+ x 6000+ still images if its resolution you want.

Adam

Quick update.

Website is almost up and running - still working on some backend stuff, but have a look: http://www.light-up.co.uk
The plug-in still has some final things I need to do before I release a free, time-limited demo - you'll be able to download it from the website. Of course it will be Mac OSX (PPC and Intel) and PC Win32. The demo is just like the real product but stamps demo labels on stuff, is time limited and I'm expecting a 2-3x performance increase from optimizations for the final release.

So, bear with us, its almost here. Matter of weeks now - and yes, I know thats later than I stated!

Adam

Why don't you just send it in smaller junks with a simple handshake protocol? The receiver just accumulates pieces until its got the whole thing.

Adam

Hi,

I have done some similar work but all in pure Ruby as a proof-of-concept. Rather than decoding AVIs etc directly into OGL textures, my ruby just uses flick-book texture strips. I too don't see myself finishing this off anytime soon so I'm happy to throw this in the pot too!

Adam

Yeah, my solution was just as nasty. I add a reference to a global list and flush the list outside the observer context. Horrid.

BTW I understand Todd's explanation wrt recursive invokation but I found I had problems if I set_attribute in an InstanceObserver too which to me is pretty unreasonable.

Adam

It has to have an effect given each instance of observer has to be dispatched. I'd be wary of going crazy with them.

My 0.02 worth.

Adam

I came to conclusion the set_attribute stuff and observers really don't get along. They are, in my experience, at best very flakey when used together. I gave up setting attributes from within observers all together...quite annoying.

I'd love to hear of any toptips to make it work though..

Adam

[désolé pour l'usage de l'anglais]

Its a very small change to use the Sketchup Texture_writer to dump the actual textures too. If you just add an extra argument to export_material(material) to make it export_material(material, entity), then you can replace my original change with this (the change is after File.exists?):

# AMB added
        elsif mat.texture
			# check which extension it is  
			filepath = File.dirname(mat.texture.filename) + "/"
			filename = File.basename(mat.texture.filename) 
			filename = filename.split(".")[0] if filename.split(".").length > 1
			
			[".jpg",".png",".tif",".bmp",".gif",".tga"].each do |ext|
				testfile = filepath + filename + ext
				unless File.exists?(testfile)
					tw = Sketchup.create_texture_writer
					tw.load(entity, true)
					tw.write(entity, true, testfile)				
				end

		          @stream.print "shader {",
		            "\n\tname \"#{name}\"",
		            "\n\ttype diffuse",
		            "\n\ttexture \"#{testfile}\"",
		            "\n}\n\n"
		          return name
			end        	
######

Adam

Operator overloading in any language is a lot of rope to hang yourself with. And its always the guy who just discovered that language feature that goes postal with it.

On a related note, I got caught badly while writing some Ruby C extension last month whereby on Win32, ruby.h quietly #defines fopen() and fclose() to be something completely different! Just insane.

Adam