Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Announcements, requests and support regarding the Blender Indigo export script
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Headroom
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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by Headroom » Mon Jun 22, 2015 10:26 am

Oscar J wrote:Another minor bug: the max SS value in Blendigo is 4. In some cases I find myself having to crank it up to 5, would be nice to be able to do that in Blendigo.
as I am examining the Blendigo code at the moment this one should be very easy to change yourself.

Go into the Blender User Preferences Panel into the Addons tab and note down the location of the folder where the Blendigo addon is stored.
Navigate to the sub-folder /properties and locate and open the render_settings.py file.

Change the numeric values in Line number 570 & 571 from to whatever value you like (I arbitrarily chose 8 ) , save the file and restart Blender.
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Last edited by Headroom on Mon Jun 22, 2015 11:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by Headroom » Mon Jun 22, 2015 10:37 am

SreckoM wrote:Also getting python error on exporting mesh as .igmesh.
Can you post a screenshot of the error message ?

I can't promise anything, but I can try ;-)

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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by Headroom » Thu Jun 25, 2015 1:00 pm

I was hoping to fix a few things in Blendigo mentioned in this thread, for example the light layer gain that can happily be set in Blendigo but does not at all get exported.
Knowing that the Blender exporter for Lux Render called LuxBlend and Blendigo were initially written by Doug Hammond I installed the latest Luxrender And LuxBlend. I was hoping to find a few hints that may help me fix and extend Blendigo.

I must say that I am pretty blown away how far ahead LuxBlend is in terms of functionality compared to Blendigo. Here are a few things that I noticed:

Support for Material Nodes
Material a preview render in the Blender material pane
View port rendering
Final render is available in Blender for compositing
etc.






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Oscar J
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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by Oscar J » Thu Jun 25, 2015 7:24 pm

Headroom wrote:I was hoping to fix a few things in Blendigo mentioned in this thread, for example the light layer gain that can happily be set in Blendigo but does not at all get exported.
Knowing that the Blender exporter for Lux Render called LuxBlend and Blendigo were initially written by Doug Hammond I installed the latest Luxrender And LuxBlend. I was hoping to find a few hints that may help me fix and extend Blendigo.

I must say that I am pretty blown away how far ahead LuxBlend is in terms of functionality compared to Blendigo. Here are a few things that I noticed:

Support for Material Nodes
Material a preview render in the Blender material pane
View port rendering
Final render is available in Blender for compositing
etc.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
This. And Luxrender is free. :(

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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by Headroom » Fri Jun 26, 2015 2:23 am

@Oscar J,
I appreciate your moral support ;-)

My post, however, really was not about LuxRender. Loading it down and installing it was simply a vehicle for me to see the status of LuxBlend. Blender is also free and open source software and so is Blendigo as it's entirely written in Python. Anyone with the skills and experience can extend i and that "anyone" IMHO does not have to be limited to Glare. In fact I made the very wise choice in 2009 to be one of the 1st 100 people to purchase an Indigo lifetime license. That was an absolute K.I.L.L.E.R deal. That mone was written off years ago so from that standpoint Indigo for me is also free. Maybe it's time to give back to the community ;-)

However, while I am very interested in doing it, currently it is a bit overwhelming. I can do some intermediate level C++ programming for embedded controls anbd have started to read some online resources to familiarize myself with python. I also am trying to understand the Blender pyhon API. It just has not all quite come together yet. I get the general sense of most of the code but not quite enough to add a button, move a pane or figure out what needs to be changed to export something.

Also, simply by having followed this forum for the 5-6 years my perception is that the most used and developed Exporters are Cindigo for Cinema 4D and SkIndigo for Sketchup. The Blender community for Indigo seems very small or at least is not very vocal on this forum. As such it is no surprise that Glare focusses their energy on their largest user base.

I wonder whether Glare is interested in any open conversation about the direction they are taking with Blendigo and what support they are willing to provide if one or more users have interest in extending Blendigo.

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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by Oscar J » Fri Jun 26, 2015 2:39 am

Oh, and nice going trying to trouble shoot the Light Layers panel. Can't see any missing parentheses or anything, also I have a feeling that the panel used to work. Seeing that the latest significant change was in June 2012 (https://code.google.com/p/blendigo/sour ... t_layer.py), maybe it's Indigo itself that has changed somehow, disabling the light layer settings to come through?

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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by fused » Fri Jun 26, 2015 2:59 am

Oscar J wrote:Oh, and nice going trying to trouble shoot the Light Layers panel. Can't see any missing parentheses or anything, also I have a feeling that the panel used to work. Seeing that the latest significant change was in June 2012 (https://code.google.com/p/blendigo/sour ... t_layer.py), maybe it's Indigo itself that has changed somehow, disabling the light layer settings to come through?
Hi Oscar, I'll have a look at it.

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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by fused » Fri Jun 26, 2015 4:42 am

The light layers are a bit weird in Blendigo.

The layer gain seem to be scaling the output of the lights directly. (which might not always be possible, for the sun for example).

@Oscar: What exactly is broken for you and how should they work instead?

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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by Oscar J » Fri Jun 26, 2015 6:12 am

Hmm... apparently the light layers do "work", they just don't work with suns, don't work with IES lights and don't work with HDRI's. They're pretty much useless ATM.

They way it should work is that the values from the light layers from Blendigo get assigned to the light layers in Indigo. Least that seems like the most intuitive way to me.

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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by Headroom » Fri Jun 26, 2015 6:41 am

The part that does work is that Blendigo actually does create light layers that show up in Indigo and can then be manipulated in the Indigo UI.

Even if fused does get things fixed - thanks for the help ! - I really don't want to stop the conversation with Lightlayers. Once one gains some confidence with the Pythn code and how it interacts with Blender my guess is that its' fairly straight forward to add new features in Indigo to Blendigo.

Now, adding MAterial Node support and other more soophisitcated features really requires commitment on a whole other level. But adding a control here and there and a couple of things to export should not be all that much work.

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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by Polinalkrimizei » Fri Jun 26, 2015 9:35 pm

Headroom, you have all my moral support, too, btw!!

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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by FakeShamus » Sat Jun 27, 2015 7:48 am

fused wrote:The layer gain seem to be scaling the output of the lights directly.
generally this is not what you want in any case, right? - by scaling just the light intensities it tends to introduce the heavy noise and fireflies that come from the weaker lights being under-sampled compared to stronger ones. I often keep all of my lights the same intensity and only adjust the layer gain in order to blend them the way I want.

and count me too as a loyal blendigo supporter - maybe it is just that we are less vocal, but I think there are a lot of us.

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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by Headroom » Sat Jun 27, 2015 10:18 am

FakeShamus wrote:
fused wrote:The layer gain seem to be scaling the output of the lights directly.
generally this is not what you want in any case, right? - by scaling just the light intensities it tends to introduce the heavy noise and fireflies that come from the weaker lights being under-sampled compared to stronger ones. I often keep all of my lights the same intensity and only adjust the layer gain in order to blend them the way I want.

and count me too as a loyal blendigo supporter - maybe it is just that we are less vocal, but I think there are a lot of us.
Based on a number of forum posts I don't think it should be modifying the lights output directly. Currently, however, Blendigo is really not exporting or modifying anything in respect to Light Layer Gain. It exports exactly what shown in the python script below, a layer name and a layer index.
Then it references the layer index in the material definition for the emitter. That's it!
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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by Headroom » Sat Jun 27, 2015 12:29 pm

fused wrote:The light layers are a bit weird in Blendigo.

The layer gain seem to be scaling the output of the lights directly. (which might not always be possible, for the sun for example).

@Oscar: What exactly is broken for you and how should they work instead?
As mentioned in reply to FakeShamus Blendigo does to appear to export anything that scales the output of the lights directly. At least there is no trace of it in the exported IGS.
I can set the Lightlayer gain in the Blender World pane to whatever. It does not result in a changed exported .igs.

Looking through the export code I am assuming you are referring to the EmissionChannel class in /export/base.py ?
That code does appear to modify the base emission, but again, that code does not appear to export anything.

However, looking through the Indigo Technical Reference I can also not see how this should be implemented.

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Re: Blendigo 3.8.25.0

Post by Oscar J » Sat Jun 27, 2015 11:29 pm

For me, it does scale up the light intensity of the emitter, as long as it isn't one of the following: sun, HDRI or IES light. A simple emitting mesh does get a higher intensity when you crank up the LL setting for it in Blendigo. At least it does for me.

However, this is still not the way it should work - for two reasons:

1. You can't increase the intensity of a sun or an IES light, without doing it in Indigo's light layers panel
every time you re-render it.

2. You can't give noisy emitter a stronger gain and then compensating that in Blendigo's LL panel to achieve the same light intensity but less noise.

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