Folks -
I finally bit the bullet that I've been rolling around in my mouth for
some time and tried to find a good ray tracing engine that coupled
(somehow) with SketchUp. The only one I have been able to get to work
at all (there are dozens) is Maxwell.
The main problems I have are:
1) It depends on MS's Silverlight and on OSX the latest version (5.x)
doesn't work with Maxwell at all. On Winderz, it is very flaky.... so
Maxwell recommends downgrading to Silverlight 4.x which I have done and
been successful at running Sketchup/Maxwell. Unfortunately this breaks
other things (notably Netflix) that depend on Silverlight. Netflix
*insists* on upgrading to the latest release of Silverlight before it
will run any video content. I'm sure there are other Silverlight
dependencies I haven't considered that will break the same way.
2) Maxwell's documentation is loaded with obscure terminology which may
or may not be standard among modern raytracers. I understand most of
the concepts around ray tracing in the abstract and even wrote my own
simple one 30 years ago (imaging to 4Kx3K 35mm film overnight!), but
naturally 30 years and a plethora of subtleties later, I am struggling.
I also got Caravaggio running but the docs English translation end right
after installation and introduction... Google translate (bless their
dark little souls) works well enough but technical jargon seems to get
translated quite literally when the terms are typically figurative.
What I want more than anything is a ray tracer where I can manually
sample rays and make the ray path visible, or even better (also) show
"flow lines", essentially isocontours of wavefronts... which give a
much better feel for the "optical flow" in a complex set of
reflection/diffraction elements.
Anyone else have a favorite Raytracer? Especially one that can run with
or import Sketchup models? Or even a simple raytracer in Ruby?
I'm doing some esoteric optical path design and wanting to double-check
my hand-cut geometric and trigonometric calculations.
I have had many times I wanted a ray tracer working with Sketchup anyway
(like to demonstrate the cross-splash problems encountered with
AnySurface/Ambient, and the bowtie/pincushion exaggeration of a
projector against a curved surface, or the effect of different levels of
diffusive screen coatings, in these circumstances).
My work with Fred Unterseher in holography also includes Holographic
Optical Elements (HOEs) and we aspire to designing them in CAD and
implementing them via digital multi-channel recording.
Etc. ad infinitum.
- Steve
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