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Ray Tracers and SketchUp

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Steve Smith

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

Bruce Sherwood

Re: Ray Tracers and SketchUp

What about Pov-Ray (povray.org)?

Bruce

On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 12:03 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> 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

Steve Smith

Re: Ray Tracers and SketchUp

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 <[hidden email]> 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

Bruce Sherwood

Re: 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

Bruce Sherwood

Re: 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

Edward Angel

Re: Ray Tracers and SketchUp

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

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 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) [hidden email]

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 <[hidden email]> 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

Steve Smith

Re: 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) [hidden email]

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 <[hidden email]> 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
============================================================
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

Steve Smith

Re: Ray Tracers and SketchUp

Thanks for all the advice on Ray Tracers and Sketchup.

FWIW

I finally settled roughly where I started with Maxwell. It's licensing
is a "freemium" model with relatively low resolution (800x600) and
limited quality iterations (but plenty good for my purposes). The
problems I had (and were documented) regarding the latest version of
Silverlight (5.x) not working correctly with it (at all? on OSX)
evaporated? I installed 4.x, got it working, then tripped over Netflix
whining (and insisting) about having 5.x. I thought when I let it
install 5.x I'd be hosed on Maxwell, but magically it worked fine. Too
subtle for me to untangle easily so I take it as a blessing for the moment.

The results are pretty good, I'm even *more* impressed with how well
SketchUp handles it's models now that I see them rendered this way.

My *real* goal was to implement the SMS (Simultaneous Multiple Surfaces)
method of reflective/refractive optics design (specifically for
non-imaging collectors), but the ray tracing is a good double-check to
show what the integrated effect is. The biggest problem is that it
seems impossible to convoluted to create *volumes* in SketchUp... so
refractive optics aren't happening... unless maybe I get the Pro version
(used to be $99, now is $499?!).

Is anyone else out there doing ad-hoc optical design of any sort? Have
any favorite tools for this? Most of what I find are either deprecated
(dead links to dead websites) or Winderz only or pricey without a trial
or free version to check out.

- 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