Re: [FRIAM] MacPro Wifi compatibility in France
I never had any problems with my Mac Air traveling all over France and northern Italy. 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 505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel On Apr 1, 2013, at 9:19 PM, Steve Smith wrote: FWIW I have a very similar model which I used without problem for 3 weeks all over Italy this summer. I saw familiar wireless routers while I was there (DLink, Linksys, Apple Airport, etc.) I have a good friend leaving this weekend for a conference in Paris, and taking her MacBook Pro. Does anyone know if there are potential issues with wifi connectivity there? From my reading I gather that 802.11h on 5Ghz is what's specifically designed for European compatibility, which doesn't appear on her mode list, and that there have been issues with with Apple products (iPad) not adhering to European limits on wifi client power levels. Here are the specs of the machine: MacBook Pro 8.1 OSx 10.6.8 Card type: Airport Extreme (0x14E4,0x06) PHY modes: 802.11 a/b/g/n Thanks, Ron -- Ron Newman, Founder MyIdeatree.com The World Happiness Meter 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
Re: [FRIAM] 3d projection
I pre-ordered one last summer. I heard from them that I'll get one fairly soon. I did not take the time to write up a description of what we intended to do with it, so I think I fell down to the bottom of their list. --Barry On Apr 1, 2013, at 9:05 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: This is so very cool! Has anone used Leap? Three.js is being used in one of the moocs by Ed's friend. -- Owen On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 10:07 AM, cody dooderson d00d3r...@gmail.com wrote: I rememeber some old arcade video games using a similar setup On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 3:36 PM, Joshua Thorp jth...@redfish.com wrote: This is a cool little build, plexiglass prism makes a hologram like effect: http://vimeo.com/59377788# 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 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
Re: [FRIAM] MacPro Wifi compatibility in France
I travel to Italy quite a bit for fairly long stay, generally 6 weeks or so. We mainly use iPads: mine is first generation, my wife's is the latest with a cell SIM. Both have never had problems with wifi where available. I have taken an older Mac Book Pro which had difficulty with the wireless security at one hotel. This was due to not having the latest WEP,WPA,WPA2,etc. This was 3-4 years ago so is likely not a problem now. Just check your wireless security options to make sure they include the more modern WPA, WPA2 .. so you have a good chance of matching their routers. -- Owen On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 8:42 PM, Ron Newman ron.new...@gmail.com wrote: I have a good friend leaving this weekend for a conference in Paris, and taking her MacBook Pro. Does anyone know if there are potential issues with wifi connectivity there? From my reading I gather that 802.11h on 5Ghz is what's specifically designed for European compatibility, which doesn't appear on her mode list, and that there have been issues with with Apple products (iPad) not adhering to European limits on wifi client power levels. Here are the specs of the machine: MacBook Pro 8.1 OSx 10.6.8 Card type: Airport Extreme (0x14E4,0x06) PHY modes: 802.11 a/b/g/n Thanks, Ron -- Ron Newman, Founder MyIdeatree.com http://www.Ideatree.us The World Happiness Meter http://worldhappinessmeter.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] Ray Tracers and SketchUp
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
Re: [FRIAM] MacPro Wifi compatibility in France
Thanks Steve, Ed, Owen. I'll check the security options. On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 9:58 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: I travel to Italy quite a bit for fairly long stay, generally 6 weeks or so. We mainly use iPads: mine is first generation, my wife's is the latest with a cell SIM. Both have never had problems with wifi where available. I have taken an older Mac Book Pro which had difficulty with the wireless security at one hotel. This was due to not having the latest WEP,WPA,WPA2,etc. This was 3-4 years ago so is likely not a problem now. Just check your wireless security options to make sure they include the more modern WPA, WPA2 .. so you have a good chance of matching their routers. -- Owen On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 8:42 PM, Ron Newman ron.new...@gmail.com wrote: I have a good friend leaving this weekend for a conference in Paris, and taking her MacBook Pro. Does anyone know if there are potential issues with wifi connectivity there? From my reading I gather that 802.11h on 5Ghz is what's specifically designed for European compatibility, which doesn't appear on her mode list, and that there have been issues with with Apple products (iPad) not adhering to European limits on wifi client power levels. Here are the specs of the machine: MacBook Pro 8.1 OSx 10.6.8 Card type: Airport Extreme (0x14E4,0x06) PHY modes: 802.11 a/b/g/n Thanks, Ron -- Ron Newman, Founder MyIdeatree.com http://www.Ideatree.us The World Happiness Meter http://worldhappinessmeter.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 -- Ron Newman, Founder MyIdeatree.com http://www.Ideatree.us The World Happiness Meter http://worldhappinessmeter.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
Re: [FRIAM] Ray Tracers and SketchUp
What about Pov-Ray (povray.org)? Bruce On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 12:03 PM, Steve Smith 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.comhttp://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
Re: [FRIAM] Ray Tracers and SketchUp
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 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
Re: [FRIAM] Ray Tracers and SketchUp
A bit off the track: Ruth some years ago wrote a Python module that can be imported into a VPython program to export scenes to Pov-Ray. She looks at the VPython scene and writes out a plain text file (or files) representing that scene in Pov-Ray scene description language. Then one can render the scene in Pov-Ray with much higher quality than is possible in the real-time VPython OpenGL rendering. We have used this extensively to make 3D images for our physics textbook. Bruce 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
Re: [FRIAM] Ray Tracers and SketchUp
As an alternative to Sketchup and ray tracing, is it possible that Blender would provide what you need, Steve? I've never used Blender myself, but I hear good things about it. Bruce 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
Re: [FRIAM] Moz 15th birthday
Mozilla the .ORG might be 15 but the Mozilla the Killer App is more like 20! I remember at the 2nd international WWW conference in Chicago, Netscape announcing themselves and using Mozilla, the Killer App as their non-sequitorial mascot. Since when is a dinosaur an ape? They jumbled King Kong and Godzilla and the idea of a Killer App and got Mozilla! For your anecdotal interest, I saw my first off-broadway show during that conference... the Rock Opera Tommy. It *really* stood out in high contrast after spending our days huddled around 1k resolution screens ooing and aahhhing over postage-stamp sized pixelated videos streaming on a web page. We were *so* impressed with ourselves... but Tommy! blew me away! Moz is 15! Just contributed: Hi! I just donated to Mozilla and got a limited-edition, 15th Anniversary plush red dino -- available only to supporters. Join me in wishing Mozilla a happy birthday and get yours before they're gone at http://bit.ly/ZoNIjM A snuggly dino! -- Owen 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
Re: [FRIAM] Moz 15th birthday
On Tue, Apr 02, 2013 at 05:08:40PM -0600, Steve Smith wrote: Mozilla the .ORG might be 15 but the Mozilla the Killer App is more like 20! I remember at the 2nd international WWW conference in Chicago, Netscape announcing themselves and using Mozilla, the Killer App as their non-sequitorial mascot. Since when is a dinosaur an ape? They jumbled King Kong and Godzilla and the idea of a Killer App and got Mozilla! I don't know what King Kong or apes had to do with it, but certainly it was a play on Mosaic killer, with a nod to Godzilla. Mosaic being the first graphical internet browser that Marc Andreessen wrote whilst at NCSA Oh, I just checked wikipedia, and can see where apes came into it. The name Godzilla derives from a combination of gorira and kujiru, which mean gorilla and whale respectively. But Godzilla was definitely a dinosaur (although a bit of mongrel of a species...). -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au 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
Re: [FRIAM] Moz 15th birthday
I'll see you one Moz and rais it a Motiff running a on sparkstation over a ISDN line at I think 12-14 and listening by way of real audio (or some other format) a McNealy Report in which he proclaimed that the Web is the platform. A few weeks later being awed by a port of netscape on a FreeBSD system on a laptop- and reading *rumours *of a development branch going opensource for nightly builds- no idea what license they were considering. This was before opensource was cool On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: Mozilla the .ORG might be 15 but the Mozilla the Killer App is more like 20! I remember at the 2nd international WWW conference in Chicago, Netscape announcing themselves and using Mozilla, the Killer App as their non-sequitorial mascot. Since when is a dinosaur an ape? They jumbled King Kong and Godzilla and the idea of a Killer App and got Mozilla! For your anecdotal interest, I saw my first off-broadway show during that conference... the Rock Opera Tommy. It *really* stood out in high contrast after spending our days huddled around 1k resolution screens ooing and aahhhing over postage-stamp sized pixelated videos streaming on a web page. We were *so* impressed with ourselves... but Tommy! blew me away! Moz is 15! Just contributed: Hi! I just donated to Mozilla and got a limited-edition, 15th Anniversary plush red dino -- available only to supporters. Join me in wishing Mozilla a happy birthday and get yours before they’re gone at http://bit.ly/ZoNIjM A snuggly dino! -- Owen 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
Re: [FRIAM] Moz 15th birthday
I don't know what King Kong or apes had to do with it, but certainly it was a play on Mosaic killer, with a nod to Godzilla. Mosaic being the first graphical internet browser that Marc Andreessen wrote whilst at NCSA Oh, I just checked wikipedia, and can see where apes came into it. The name Godzilla derives from a combination of gorira and kujiru, which mean gorilla and whale respectively. But Godzilla was definitely a dinosaur (although a bit of mongrel of a species...). What I remember being puzzled about was that the Netscape folks (they were brand new then, navigator 1.0 releasing just afterwards) at the conference kept trying to explain Mozilla as the Killer APP... APP, APE, Get it!? they would say... but of course it wasn't an ape it was Barney on steroids! So it was clearly an inside joke or a multi-sequitor where the middle links were left out, leaving the rest of us with the sense of a non-sequitor. 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
Re: [FRIAM] Ray Tracers and SketchUp
Pov-Ray is pretty standard. What kinds of output does Sketch-Up provide? Pete Shirley (formerly Utah, now Nvidia) was working on GPU ray tracers. 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. 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 505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel On Apr 2, 2013, at 1:52 PM, Steve Smith wrote: Bruce - What about Pov-Ray (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 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 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
Re: [FRIAM] Ray Tracers and SketchUp
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
