is anything like lightscape out there?

[Alex Boeckheler]

hi
cgarchitect is my startpage in my browser for about 7 years but i have never posted here. so much for my desparation....
i am a german architect who used to work for a big office and we used lightscape alot to show clients the interior daylight situations. always looked into stunned faces when we walked around in realtime having true lighting information stored in the model whereas competitors showed pictures or animations. modeling sucked though and i often had to redo the entire model someone else in the office had done to get rid of those ugly shadowleakes. you lightsscape veterans know what i mean...but the results were worth the effort.
now my question:
i have my own little office for a couple of years now and never had the time nor did the project sizes allow any rendering at all. exporting from my cad-software to sketch-up and presenting our projects in there with realtime shadows did the job. with that we are still ahead to competitors. but recently i stumbled over the maxwellplugin for sketch-up and tried it out because we have a tricky project that requires real daylightsimulation. very nice idea with instant radiosity rendering but nothing has changed when it comes to rendertimes. maxwell still sucks the same like 5 years ago when i last tried it. i wish i could try out lightscape with my present a**kickin computer.
has anyone an idea about a plugin for sketchUp or standalone software that has the same realtime qualities like lightscape. the onlyone that seems to come close is LumenRT by EON but theres no demoversion and no videotutorials out there. has anyone worked with it?
lots of questions and i really dont expect anyone to read that. we lightscape veterans are an endangered species...
bye
alex

[Justin Hunt]

check out Lightup for sketchup. Not quite Lightscape quality though.

jhv

[Alex Boeckheler]

amazing! someone reads this...
tnx for your instant reply, justin. i have checked lightup this morning and its not even close to lightscape. most important it is missing radiosity. only direct lighting and some tricks with ambient light. you could might as well take a free game-engine to achive this...
thanks for your help anyway...
alex
btw i really like your renderings...

[Justin Hunt]

Thanks, there is aways vray and now maxwell for sketchup

[Alex Boeckheler]

as i said, they are both not realtime. have you ever used lightscape? it calculated the lightdistribution over the entire model and stored the lighting solution into the geometry. afterwards you were able to move around without recalculation. and if you didnt need colour bleeding, you could even change textures on the fly. to make along story short: it rocked!
i heard something about a realtime vray. do you know something about that?
thanks for your reply anyway...

[maria prem]

you could always bake in lighting in vray then take it to a realtime engine a little bit work around but thats the only thing available now i think

[Benjamin Steinert]

Unity Pro's global illumination is powered by this:

http://gameware.autodesk.com/beast

...which used to be illuminate labs turtle, which if I recall correctly was a lot like lightscape, but used mainly within Maya. I think Blender may even have a way to accomplish something similar but I have not explored it much myself.

The real realtime tools such as unity, unreal engine, cryengine, and perhaps to a slightly lesser extent Lumion are the only way to accomplish a truly realtime interactive visualization, but there is a lot of time involved in preparing a project (not too much unlike Lightscape probably) for these products. The realtime rendering utilities such as Octane, iRay, VRayRT, Arion, etc. might fill your need, but they are a different breed of realtime, one that I would consider as being more accelerated on-demand rendering than realtime rendering.

I actually bought into the Fryrender beta years ago becasue there were strong indications that they would eventually have something like this in what was then dubbed RC4, but it turned into Arion, a much different utility. Don't get me wrong, I still feel that Fryrender and it's subproducts turned into great and powerful tools for the purposes which they were built, it just ended up being quite different than what I wanted.

I even remember back when Autodesk Viz first got an inbuilt radiosity solution, you could calculate the radiosity mesh and then preview it in the viewport with viewport materials! I thought it was amazing...then it got scrapped and replaced with Mental Ray which has yet to offer any feature of that sort.

When I look at what is being done with point clouds it seems pretty obvious to me that the current technology is up to par, it just needs somebody in the know to harness it. Maybe eventually somebody will attempt to fill this void of the rendering industry, but currently I am unaware of anything that can do this.

[Alex Boeckheler]

wow so much information. i can tell that i have been out of the rendering biz in the past five years while beeing kneedeep in the construction gore. i checked thru all of your hints to the various software products (and i can understand why you are disappointed by fryrender - just another maxwell!!). but i am still surprised that there is nothing out there to comply to a basic need of every architect: showing a client in realtime how bright or dark in reality his interior would be under different lighting situations. all those on the fly render concepts like arion, vrayrt, maxwell fire etc are not handy at all. way to much noise...
you are right, the beast thing by autodesk (ernst viewer would suit me perfectly, dont need unity) seems the only thing almost comparable to ls, it even seems to provide texture baking AND vertex shading. but did u watch the videos on the autodesk site? distributed rendering over 16 workstations only to get this ...? and i dont want to know the pricing...
after all i dont think we have come a long way since then...
well seems i have to wait five more years to get a descent vertexshaded global illumination for sketchup (hopefully with built in geometry optimisation ;-) that provides reliable lighting presentation...until then ill stick to sketch-up and convince my clients that they wont sit in the dark...
thank you anyway

[Alex Boeckheler]

ps.
btw the autodesk viz built in radiosity solution was actually lightscape as far as i remember. they put it in after they bought lightscape. but then everyone focused on rendering stills and they burried it...sad...

[Justin Hunt]

Its still in Max, Set your renderer to scanline and in the advanced rendering tab is Radiosity.

jhv