Posts made by Chris_at_Twilight

I used modeling to provide the emitter / reflection combination. I moved the screen back a tiny bit and placed another "plastic" surface in front. Made the apple glow, just because.

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@unknownuser said:

@chris_at_twilight said:

I like the idea of it being "useful" (does that mean by posting you agree to let people freely use your scene?)

But I'd prefer it to be more "conceptual", otherwise everyone's models will look the same, won't they?

fwiw chris,
remus runs a competition here in which a general topic is given and it's up to you to decide what to draw.. (albeit within a certain time limit)
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewforum.php?f=291

Good point! I have seen those just recently. I retract my objection

I like the idea of it being "useful" (does that mean by posting you agree to let people freely use your scene?)

But I'd prefer it to be more "conceptual", otherwise everyone's models will look the same, won't they?

Your second image looks most realistic to me... LEDs are often overexposed in photos.
By the way, what kind of material did you use? The LEDs themselves look really good.

I have a bunch of LEDs in front of me from a Christmas toy I tore apart. It looks like the curve of the acrylic is positioned just right to focus on the emitter, just like a lens. I suspect that distance is important. (Anyone know the IOR of the acrylic? 1.49 is a common acrylic number)

@edmund said:

It was an accident that my light bulb size(radius) was at 50.8

50.8 is millimeter equivalent of 2 inches, the default light size.

Just want to put a little blurb out about the latest Twilight release!

Announcing our next release, version 1.1!!

The big new features we've added:

Several languages available:

• Spanish
  • French
  • Chinese (simplified and traditional)
  • Japanese
  • German

You can choose your language from Options -> Twilight Languages.
A huge thanks to all those who helped put those translations together!!!

A new View-and-Framing Tool:

*  Frames exactly what will be rendered and adds guide lines to aid composition
*  Condenses pan, orbit and look around functions into one handy tool
*  Allows you to accurately set the focus distance without reorienting the camera

This replaces two previous features: The "letterboxing" seen when you uncheck the 'Fixed Aspect Ratio' checkbox, and the "Set Camera Target" context menu choice. You are no longer limited to 'focusing' only on objects in the center of the view. Orbit around the 'highlighted' geometry point instead of some mystery point. All action is done with the left mouse button, leaving the middle mouse button available for the traditional SketchUp orbit tool.

And a lot more fixes and features

New Licensing Mechanism (Don't worry, your existing license is still fine!!)
Projector Lights image improvements
Material editor improvements
SSS material template has been redone to give dramatically better results.
Layers in components are rendered as they are visible, by default. You can choose to render "All Layers" from the context menu.
Transparency of TGA images is now directly recognized.
Save rendered images as EXR
And More!

Dragon Fountain. (I know, no spray... it's... off for the season, closed for cleaning)

@unknownuser said:

Twilight User

Here's my problem -

Place model in 'Basic Studio' with Omni Light behind model
Apply SSS material to model (Red Gum)
Sunlight Disabled
Sky Type - Background Color (Black)
Render at Medium+ (Still Cooking after 30mins)
Vista64bit - AMD Turion X2 Dual Core - 4GB
When i cooked at lower presets the model was very dark? Do i need to up light size?

The Low, Med, High presets, being biased, don't do nearly as good a job at SSS as the unbiased methods. They have to make approximations and assumptions which can turn out quite well sometimes, but with complicated organic shapes you aren't going to get as good of results. At at the really low end, with Low or Low+, you may not actually get any results from SSS and translucency because those are designed for higher speed.

@al hart said:

We are going to switch to using SetDllDirectory() ourselves, which will eliminate this problem, but we both need to be carefull to reset it so we don't mess up anyone else who is depending on the current directory method of loading DLLs

@chris_at_twilight said:

I've added code to Twilight to restore the "default" search path immediately after loading the dll, and that seems to work well, so I suggest doing that also.

My suggestion exactly. It's already been implemented in Twilight and will be in place in the next release.

Sorry for the confusion. I meant, with the next release, this will be added. The current publicly available release does not 'reset' the dll search path.

The code I'm using is Windows API. SetDllDirectory (more on it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686203%28VS.85%29.aspx)

@al hart said:

@chris_at_twilight said:

Certainly Twilight is not actively impacting it.

Does Twilight make a ruby call, or a Windows call, to change the DLL search path?
(I am wondering because it looks in the twilight folder before the windows folder)

If so, then we could make a similar call to add "c:\Program Files\Render Plus Systems\IRender_nXt\bin_nxt" to the DLL search path.
Thanks,

Yes, exactly. If you set your search path immediately before loading the dll, that should resolve the problem. This is probably a good idea no matter what because, according to Microsoft, the DLL search that is finding the arobjects.dll is looking in the "current path". Since many things can influence the current path, it's probably not safe to rely too much on it.

I've added code to Twilight to restore the "default" search path immediately after loading the dll, and that seems to work well, so I suggest doing that also.

I think I've got it. Twilight adds it's own directory to the DLL search path. According to Microsoft documentation, simply adding a directory to the search path (not changing, just adding), switches the DLL search mode from "Default". Probably IRender is not setting it's own search paths, but relying on the "default". You can see more about it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686203%28VS.85%29.aspx

I've modified Twilight to restore the "default" search mode and IRender works after that. However, if there are any plugins loaded before Twilight who are using a modified dll search path, switching to "default" mode can impact them in the same way. So either way, there is no really "safe" method. One way or the other has a potential to impact other plugins. As notareal said, dll hell.

I guess the best "safe" practice is to set your own dll search path, load your dll, then restore to the default. If everyone did that it would probably avoid all these issues.

I ran SketchUp through ProcMon to watch what libraries are getting loaded when NXT works and when it doesn't. It appears that when it doesn't work, Windows is unable to locate the arobjects.dll. Why having Twilight running makes any difference for that, I can't imagine. Certainly Twilight is not actively impacting it. It doesn't appear to be a VC++ problem either (thought I'm not certain), as you can see the 2005 (VC8) dlls are loaded in the images.

Sorry, yes, I meant IRender.

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When I installed the demo for IDX, it installed the Visual C++ 2005 runtime dll's. Twilight uses the 2008 dll's. I've never encountered (I think) an application with plugins using separate VC++ dlls so I don't know that this is the cause...actually I kind of expect it should work but Microsoft made such big changes with SxS etc... who knows.

We'll try to help solve this too. We have no intention of conflicting with any other software.

According to the documentation, yes, they should all be identical. Though the 3rd form isn't in the docs...(I'm looking at the old ones, not the latest).

Here are a couple animations I did recently.

The first is a small lego car. The animation is done with SketchyPhysics, a couple motors attached to the wheels.

[flash=425,244:326bzewc]http://www.youtube.com/v/1re2CaZMboI[/flash:326bzewc]

The second is called The Dispersion Clock. It's really just a proof of concept (thus the crappy render quality )
It's a prism rotated by a SketchyPhysics motor.

[flash=200,161:326bzewc]http://www.youtube.com/v/l_BY154snag[/flash:326bzewc]