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
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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