Ed -
Pov-Ray is pretty standard. What kinds of output does Sketch-Up provide?
The format is obscured in binary but there is an SDK/API for reading the
format. Ultimately it is polygons and materials properties of course.
Pete Shirley (formerly Utah, now Nvidia) was working on GPU ray tracers.
I'm peripherally working with Optix (nVidia-Cuda raytracer)on an
(orthogonally) related project for spherical (dome) stereo with Micoy
Corp and Carolina/Dirk. GPU accellerated 360 stereo ray-tracing.
There is also an example of a WebGL fragment shader ray tracer in
WebGL Beginners Guide. If you have Obj files, there are Obj to JS
converters so you could use the data with WebGL.
Sounds promising. What I'm mainly seeking is a quick and dirty way to
test/demo my optical paths (non-imaging collectors and light guides)...
Sketchup being the one 3D modeling package I'm *facile* with (I have
used Maya but have no license and Blender as well but find it a bit too
obtuse)
Since you helped instigate a lot of the dome work, you will be
interested to know that from the work I did with Tom in Flatland a
decade ago, the NSF/PFI work of a few years ago and ongoing
collaborations with IAIA, there is still interesting work churning out.
360 stereographic capture and projection for example.
- Steve
Ed
__________
Ed Angel
Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory
(ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico
1017 Sierra Pinon
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)an...@cs.unm.edu <mailto:an...@cs.unm.edu>
505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel
<http://www.cs.unm.edu/%7Eangel>
On Apr 2, 2013, at 1:52 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
Bruce -
What about Pov-Ray (povray.org <http://povray.org/>)?
Sounds promising... I'm familiar wtih POV-ray and should have looked
for the option. It wasn't listed (I should look again!) on the
Sketchup Plugin site because the method is an external converter
(though Maxwell does the same, only with hooks to fire it off
automatically inside SkUp).
Have you (or anyone else?) used it with SketchUp?
Material definition is the biggest challenge. The Maxwell converter
seems to make some reasonable assumptions about transparent materials
in SketchUp and has a method for assigning Maxwell material
properties to SketchUp geometry (though it is a little odd). Most
of my current interest is in diffusive and reflective (rather than
diffractive) surfaces. Unfortunately I don't see any way to
actually model *solids* in SkUp, just surfaces, so no lenses or prisms!
Thanks!
- Steve
Bruce
On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 12:03 PM, Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com
<mailto:sasm...@swcp.com>> wrote:
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
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribehttp://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
