Hello people of Facepunch,
I come to you with an interesting idea, please consider it.
I come from the world of entertainment lighting, (i.e. Theatrical, Concert, whatever) and I have become frustrated with the software available to me. The particular software to which I am referring is lighting visualization. Many different companies make such software.
[url]http://www.espvision.com/[/url]
[url]http://www.capturesweden.com/[/url]
[url]http://www.cast-soft.com/cast/products/meetwysiwyg.php[/url]
These software options all work in their own way, but it seems to me that their rendering engines are very outdated, slow, and poor. I always thought making a visualizer in a video game engine would be much more effective. I have no skills in writing software, but I can guarantee there is a market out there for it. (ESP Vision sells for 1500 dollars a licence).
Software like this would require
1.) A library of lighting instruments, and their behaviors
2.) some kind of connection to DMX or artnet, [url]http://www.sandsys.com/products/sandnet/index.htm[/url] this program is probably as good a place to start as any
3.) A beefed up lighting engine, though most modern games have the requisite lighting capabilities
These features would make it much better
1.) A way to import from CAD, my preferred program for light plots is vectorworks
2.) Video recording capabilities
So, the question is, does anyone know someone who would be interested in such a project, and how involved would it be? As I said before, I have no skills in writing software, but I have plenty of experience with the equipment the program is emulating.
Wouldn't it be easier to use something along the lines of 3DS Max or Cinema4D along with a library of the lights which are to be used? The already have proper lighting engines, easy export to cad and video recording stuffs, although I don't know how it would connect to your lighting instruments themselves
I have never used 3ds max or Cinema4D. I figured a video game engine would work well because the framework is all there without a lot of extraneous features. Both of the programs you mentioned are well over 1000 dollars a piece. Im not looking for photo-realistic rendering, just something that would give you a good idea of what the lighting systems are doing. It is not connecting to the lighting instruments, it connects to the console and creates a virtual rendering of what the instruments are doing. It would be most useful for programming a show before entering the space, and then being able to make only minor adjustments upon arrival rather than starting from scratch
A Udk application would work pretty for ease of setup and programming though basically for visualizations only, but rasterizing based engines doesn't emulate light very well without a lot of additional work.
Ray tracing would give the most accurate results and is probably what the application you listed are using which contributes to the slow speed.
For connecting to light setups and systems, I have no idea how that would be set up.
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