Sketchup Plugin a must?? Maybe??

[Scooby2]

Hi

Firstly Congratulations on the work and development so far. The product looks great with an attractive UI and early renders indicate a robust engine.. Im looking forward to using LR in the future.

Regarding plugins, I know its early days but may I suggest a link to Google Sketchup? Both Kerkythea & Indigo I believe are benefiting from the plugins available for these (Look at the Kerkythea website forums SU posts 198, Blender 52, 3D MAx 25)

Regards

Scaifee

[Sheltem]

Hi Guys,

I was just wondering whether there are any plans to provide a sketchup plugin for Lux once 0.6 is out. A lot of architectural practices I know use sketchup (hey its for free ) and then move on to "serious" cad once the rough design has been signed off on. It would be great to have the ability to use the same render software - Lux that is - in both stages. I am trying to get an exporter for Revit (very serious ) going but I do not think that I will have the time to do one for sketchup as well...

In addition I think this will widen the user base of Lux which in turn might help the devs in regards to testing / bug hunting.

Just my 5 cents worth...

Cheers!

S

ps

I posted a query in the sketchup C++ forum... not sure whether anybody will go for it though:
http://groups.google.com/group/su-sdk-fileshare/browse_thread/thread/535f357d4f4a5c84?hl=en

[Radiance]

Hi,

I have been planning to write a sketchup plugin myself after the v0.6 is out of the door,
possibly as a test-bed of the upcoming lux introspection API to generate content for exporters.

Maybe i will be quite busy and it might take some time, so i might solicit for help to build it in a shorter time,
so best wait till a few weeks when i've started and there will be some initial news

Radiance

[Sheltem]

Hi Radiance,

that sounds good to me!

Cheers!

S

[Benighted]

Hi,

I'm just wondering what the status of this plugin, has anybody started writing it yet?

Just curious as I'm playing with the idea of writing one myself and it'd be a waste of time if someone already has a working plugin. As of now I'm using Kerkythea to render my SketchUp sketches, but as a guy with his heart in open source I'd like to change to LuxRenderer, and as I just don't like the blender user interface I'm not using Lux as much as I'd like.

/Benighted

[Radiance]

Hi,

Once v0.6 is released, we can start on v0.7, which will feature an introspection API.
This is a dependency for new exporters, as starting one now will require a rewrite in a few weeks.

I suggest, if we do a sketchup plugin, we do it with the introspection API, and with sketchup's C/C++ api.
Do you have experience with C/C++ API programming ?

Radiance

[Benighted]

OK, that's interesting, I haven't worked on any introspective stuff in C++ so I'll look forward on learning more about it

I'm currently looking through the source code of Lux to get a better feel of the program (Later on I'd like to do some work in the Core as I like to do some simulation of some more complex aspects of light (polarization, fluorescence (even possibly phosphorescence (which does not have a great deal of effect in the realism of things, but just for fun, to see how to implement it (I'm a theoretical physicist by education, and do like these weird things )), dffraction, true sub-surface scattering (I don't actually know if Lux already does SSS?). But as a first education on the workings of Lux I think learning it's input format and API:s are a good way to go. I'm also reading both the ruby and the C/C++ API:s for SketchUp.

While I'm at it, and reading through the code, do you guys want me to do some UML dependency style diagrams and so on for the code? As I'll probably do it anyway for my own understanding so I could do it in a nicer way than pen and paper if you have any use for it?

I have done some personal as well as some work-related stuff with C/C++ API:s in the past (a couple of years ago) so I don't think it should be a problem, the greatest problem is, as always, finding time to do it, but I'll think I can do some 4-8h a week of work on it.

[jeanphi]

Hi,

Nice! I plan to work on SSS after v0.6 but I'd really like to see lux support polarization. I did it with another renderer and it is a visible thing, especially in crystals. However it will most probably have a strong impact on speed
Regarding UML graphs, there's a doxygen config file that allows you to get nice include/class/... graphs for lux code base.

Jeanphi

[lfrisken]

Now that Indigo Renderer has gone commercial, this will an interesting time for Lux...

[DareDevil]

Hi !
I teach computer graphics in a french school of architecture and I used to teach Indigo on Sketchup (and C4D).
Indigo was my choice cause it's free and the Sketchup interface is very simple, so I can show a simple 3D soft rendering an high quality image. The students like that !!

... But... Indigo was free, not open source, and how I was afraid, it become commercial

So, I come back to Luxrender (following the way traced by Radiance)

But no exporter for Sketchup
I'm not a very good Ruby developer, but I can try to do something using other open source exporters for SU, like Kerkythea or PoV.

The only thing I need is the spec of Luxrender file, I don't found it on the site

Thank's for this open source project !!

------------------
Edit :

I found the file spec (http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/index.php ... ile_format)
I did'nt go down on the documentation main page