Posts made by lewiswadsworth

@dale said:

My wife and I were staying up 4 Mile Canyon at Boulder Mountain Lodge. It was a beautiful setting, with a long history. I have been trying to find out if it was affected by the fire, but no luck so far. WE are really saddened, as they were wonderful folks who ran the lodge.

I was in just north of there on Monday, in Lefthand Canyon, and ash was coming down from the sky like light snow.

I believe Fourmile is on the other side of the ridge in this photo, that I took from Route 36 that afternoon.

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Wife and kids will be traveling with me, but I will try to stop by before going out to dinner with my Boulder relatives.

I'll remove the identical image from the meet&greet thread.

@chris fullmer said:

Oh Lewis, you are such a charmer when you want to be

That's why I decided to take up fencing.

(It's actually a pity that there is no fencing style involving two-handed broadswords...an epee may not prove sufficient for particularly charming incidents.)

Actually, Mike, I got rid of the EEE-pc after the batteries died a year ago and proved as expensive to replace as buying a new one. Now I have the inevitable Core7 16" monster Sony...at least it will handle decent-sized files.

It's actually the dry season, in a dryer than normal year in Boulder now (I have an aunt who has lived in Boulder 40 years now -- spoke with her about this last night). Probably won't be a long storm, if one comes, but it could be violent.

It's a neat part of the world, if you haven't been there. The mountains rise up out of the Great Plains with no almost transition, right there.

Bring a camera and drive up into Rocky Mountain National Park, if you have an extra day. It's really nice.

@mike lucey said:

That's a good idea .... turning eye sores into art

This beat me for a competition, the BSA Unbuilt, that I won in 2009 to somewhat less publicity. You can see my unsuccessful 2010 entry here:

http://lewiswadsworth.net/lw4/2010/06/19/design/wol/

(It's not modeled in SketchUp.)

Thomas Shine overlapped me a year at YSOA. He is possibly one of the few architecture students from the school that who had a worse time there, I suspect, than I did. His final studio project's design (so the story goes) was stolen by a principal of a certain very powerful architecture firm, and used as the basis for the new World Trade Center tower. Shine was courageous enough to sue for copyright violation, despite (this is my memory of student gossip, I want to clarify) the risk that he would find himself blackballed in the profession.

The case makes for interesting reading.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/arts/design/28bern.html

The certain-very-powerful firm settled.

Although I would have preferred to win the BSA Unbuilt again, I am happy to see that Thomas Shine and his firm are prospering after all that.

@davidboulder said:

+1 on interest in learning about adding lights with IES in Shaderlight.

Be sure to talk to him before he is arrested for throttling me. Apparently my review of the application at PPB2, which prompted the quoted note, really bothered the company.

http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/showthread.php?12906-Shader-light-for-Google-Sketchup

@unknownuser said:

So laptops. I see they recommend bringing your laptop but I am wondering how useful it would be to have one there. I don't own one BTW.

It would be nice to hear from those of you who have been to past Basecamps.

At this time of year in Boulder, daytime temperatures can be in excess of 90F (though likely less), with humidity of 10% or so, and nighttimes can drop into the low 50's or high 40's. Bring a jacket. It got cold at the last Basecamp in Boulder, the night of the party, which was held outside.

I brought my laptop to both basecamps, and used them in both.

Note that it also permits animation (or at least parented "control" of SketchUp models):

http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/docs/sketchupmodels.html

So this is why Google wanted SketchUp? To jumpstart the actualization of their Snowcrashfantasies?

A friend brought this to my attention...this project is used extensively to illustrate some new 3DS Max Design 2010 features in a Youtube video:

[flash=480,295:3e3kzyzd]http://www.youtube.com/v/J4tDM0D2BW8&hl=en&fs=1[/flash:3e3kzyzd]

The rendered viewport with shadows and lighting (theirlighting--added by someone else in Max, as I certainly didn't plan those down-lights on the sides of the building) is very impressive, and I wish I could justify buying a copy of the program, especially since they are advertising it with my work!

They don't mention at any time in the video that I modeled this version of the Stormhouse in something else than 3DS Max, though...an interesting omission! As I noted in the original thread on this project, it has successively has been drawn by hand and modeled in Blender, Rhino, and finally SU 6, and only belatedly imported into Max for rendering.

Sorry for the link error...I fixed it in my original post. At one point it was possible to embed Youtube in a post here, but I can't make it work anymore.

Here:

This was done with the beta version of the SketchUp-to-Max importer, and then (quite painfully) I converted the Standard materials created by the importer to Mental Ray "Pro Materials." (It was painful because I am not a Max person, and it's excruciating for me to try to recall/figure out how to do this after five years of notusing 3DS Max.) I thought I had posted these, but perhaps I managed to hit one of those days where the SCF server was reset.

I will have to check on that article...thanks for the heads-up.

I did make that model with SketchUp, entirely. However, I was also given last fall a chance to test a SketchUp-to-Max importer, which must now be officially part of the new 3DS Max release. It was a very nice importer, even in beta on an older version of Max...SketchUp materials became Max materials, components became instances, SketchUp layers became Max layers, and smoothing in SketchUp was maintained in Max. I'm almost certain I posted some examples of the work here, because I remember comments...but I can't find it.

The only real issue is of course how expensive Max is...I honestly cannot justify buying a license to it anymore, since that kind of heavy photoreal visualization work is not really my priority. So I don't and probably won't have a copy of 3DS Max 2010.

And I did grant AutoDesk a non-exclusive a right to use the my SketchUp model with their software, and even to include it with the Max examples on the installation disk.

Dale,

This is esoteric but I feel it is partly my responsibility to keep up with running SketchUp with WINE in Linux, since I started that thread that now seems cited by so many other websites about the practice.

http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=9687

For some reason, Profile Builder is the only Ruby script that does not work for me in that environment. It's usually a line-ending problem which can be solved by a dos2unix shell command very quickly, but something else seems to be happening here...I used that on every rb file, js file, and plb file associated with Profile Builder. The script loads, but no library names or profile names appear in the Profile Builder window.

I don't expect you or anyone to work on this, since it is such a strange situation for your script, but I thought I would make a note of it here so that the problem would at least by public.

Incidentally, all of your other scripts work just fine after line-ending conversion in the Linux/WINE environment.

--Lewis

There is a more professional piece of software available called Lamina which is also designed to unfold geometry. It allows you to input the real thickness of the material being unfolded, and then it prepares a cutting sheet with numbers and even tabs if you want them. You can save the output as a DXF cutting path for use with laser or plasma cutters or a waterjet/waterknife.

http://laminadesign.com/index.html

It's pricy...$395, but it's aimed at fabricators and rapid prototyping shops. I bought a copy after learning that some sculptors were using it for preparing sheetmetal for assembly...it does a nice job making complexly curved surfaces developable (not that's a situation you often see with SketchUp models...with Rhino, it's inevitable).

I used to work in a university fabrication lab, generally using Rhino as my base modeler and various CAM software upstream. There's a Picasa gallery of stuff left over from that gig that I show my Rhino students:

http://picasaweb.google.com/LewisWadsworth/RhinoExamples?authkey=MD8rvbmyj54#

Rhino still lends itself to this sort of work. I've been considering long term plans for creating my own fabrication shop, but the economically uncertain times have put a bit of a hold on that.

Something else I had sitting about...a Rhino model made using the free Grasshopper plugin, rendered using the Penguin NPR rendering plugin.

I need to get back into doing this sort of stuff...

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I just noticed that there has been an update for Flamingo and it seems different...perhaps it's worth another look. Flamingo for Rhino is a separate USD 495 purchase, though.

http://www.flamingo3d.com/

Yes, Rhino has a stripped-down scanline-renderer built-in, with multiple light sources and shadow types. Version 4 does not have real-time shadows in a viewport, though. (This is one of those hinted features for Rhino 5.)

The "Rhino render" doesn't do Ray tracing, though. I really do not recommend McNeel's own Flamingo renderer, which has some nice texturing features (all procedural) but is painfully slow...I stopped installing my copy about three years ago. I get the impression McNeel is abandoning it. In theory, there should be a Flamingo NXT or something soon, a version of Accurender customized for Rhino...at one point, I was on a betatester list for that but it seems to have disappeared.

I did spring for McNeel's Penguin renderer, which permits NPR rendering very similiar to SketchUp's Styles, except that it includes useful items like a built-in depth-mask and shadow-mask generator.

The attached image, which I use in a demo for my 3D design class, is a product of Rhino's built-in scanline render with a separate rendering using Penguin in hidden-line mode layered over it.

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@unknownuser said:

If you want the same easy use than Sketchup and the same fully Nurbs compatible with Rhino try Moment of Inspiration
(direct SKP export)

Actually, some characteristics that are available in Rhino 3DM files (block function, layers, and materials) do not actually do anything in MOI, but I'm sure that will change. I've been playing around with embedding and linking MOI files into a Rhino master file, without much to show for it so far...it works, though. I have to have a legitimate NURBS-only project to actually put some impetus on this. My only problem with MOI is that I learned it eight years after I learned Rhino, and most operations I want are easier for me to imagine using Rhino's somewhat more traditional interface than the quasi-SketchUp UI of MOI, but I think that could change. I need to just recognize that SketchUp is done and over with as anything but a legacy application and force myself to use MOI more.

Really important distinction between Rhino and MOI: as of version 4, Rhino can function, out of the box, as a full 2D CAD program in addition to a 3D NURBS modeler, incidentally...MOI can't and isn't aimed at that 2D function.

If you're really interested, Jeff, I teach a course in 3D Design using Rhino. The syllabus is fairly comprehensive, and might be helpful to you even if you can't attend the lectures. Drop me a PM and I'll give you a link.