Lightscape

[glorybound]

Does anybody know what was the demise of Lightscape? I remember having good results using it. It was clunky, but good. I remember when creating textures you would have a drop down of what kind of material it was and it would apply all the information to the textures. It was also neat to watch it calc. It would start turning on lights in the rooms, which was cool. It also baked all the lighting so a live walk through was a product of the rendering. I would send the file to the client with the viewer and they would be able to walk through the scene as they wished. I also used a pan plug-in that allowed me to create a pan file along a path.

What happened to it? I still have my copy and should take it out someday. Under new workstations it might be fast, which when I was using it was slow, but with a Pentium II and 512Mb of ram why wouldn't it be? Was it just before its time?

[dellis]

Yeah....i wondered what happened to it as well. I bought my copy when it was version 3.2....which just so happened to be the version that they discontinued. They made no announcements which kind of sucked but whatever....live and learn. My reseller did say that they would knock some money off a copy of VIZ or MAX but i never pursued it. I wonder if the deal would still stand. I should install it on a new machine, see if its faster.

[glorybound]

Lightscape

Just dug mine up



Lightscape was probably from a Russian developer that Autodesk bought out, screwed up, and discontinued.

[dlparisi]

I believe it's pretty simple. Lightscape Technologies got bought out by Autodesk. They kept it around for a while until it was incorporated into Max/Viz.

[glorybound]

Lightscape

Probably like Metal Ray I suppose.

[instinct]

well mental ray got integrated but wasnt bought by Autodesk....i assume they'd have to buy out softimage....wonder if avid would give up on SI if Autodesk tried with enough money :P

But the lightscape features are basically integrated into max...including viewport preview...just check out scanliner's Advanced Lighting tab set to radiosity mode

Regards,
Thorsten

[mcvltd]

Re: Lightscape

Does anybody know what was the demise of Lightscape?

One word... Autodesk.

I'll never forgive them for it.

Watch out maya....

[Frances]

Lightscape was aquired by Discreet Logic. Discreet Logic was aquired by Autodesk. What would have been LS 4.0 was incorporated into VIZ r4 and is now also integrated with Max (since Max 6.0).

If the Lightscape integration could have come with its stellar ray tracer, the result would have been stunning. Unfortunately, that didn't happen and most former LS users were extremely unhappy with the inferior Max/VIZ ray tracer. It is hard to say whether implementing a high quality ray tracer in Max/VIZ would be worth the effort. Without things like translucency and glossy reflection/refraction, radiosity may always be nothing more than a legacy engine.

[Dschaga]

Re: Lightscape

Does anybody know what was the demise of Lightscape?

One word... Autodesk.

I'll never forgive them for it.

Watch out maya....

double it!

[Dschaga]

Lightscape was aquired by Discreet Logic. Discreet Logic was aquired by Autodesk. What would have been LS 4.0 was incorporated into VIZ r4 and is now also integrated with Max (since Max 6.0).

If the Lightscape integration could have come with its stellar ray tracer, the result would have been stunning. Unfortunately, that didn't happen and most former LS users were extremely unhappy with the inferior Max/VIZ ray tracer. It is hard to say whether implementing a high quality ray tracer in Max/VIZ would be worth the effort. Without things like translucency and glossy reflection/refraction, radiosity may always be nothing more than a legacy engine.

ehhhm :-/


Kinetix (= Autodesk) tried to sell a radiosityplugin for viz/max called "radioray" in ~1997, which doesn't sold very well, since there was a better player around for lightsimulating: Lightscape ..i think we are talking about r3.11 which was sold for about 3000usd ...if i remember right.

When Autodesk bought Lightscape the price dropped to ~500usd and they released 3.2 without any support for the unix versions.
Radioray was discontinued but intergrated into viz4!
Lightscape was discontinued with r3.2 SP1 and then there was an offer to crossgrade to viz... to a radiosity engine which wasn't able to offer the same results and speed. Also the raytracer was not able to offer similar results.

@Glorybound
Try lightscape with XP sp1 and opengl optimized gfxcard drivers and lightscape will surprise you. It's fast but it only uses one cpu(core) for processing. The raytracer itself is still outstanding in quality but not the fastest with vray and other modern raytracer in mind.

[Randy]

Good old Lightscape. It's running on Windows x64 and Vista x64 too. Just a bit tricky to get it work. I'll post this for the Lightscape-addicted who cant live without it (like me).
The installer will complain about missing 16/8bit system ... and quit.
Install LS3.2 on a 32bit machine (client or use vmware), start it and enter your personal serial number and activation code. Copy the installation folder to a path of your choice on your x64 machine.
Now export two reg-entries from the 32bit machine: regedit, (on the left pane, right click - export.)

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\Lightscape]
and
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\Lightscape]

The first key contains your registration data and should be fine. The second key needs a bit tweaking.
Change every reg-path from:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\Lightscape\3. 2\Profile]
to
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Autodesk\L ightscape\3.2\Profile]
(You have to add the \Wow6432Node\). Make sure the installation path in the reg entry is ok (D:\Program Files\Lightscape\...)

Copy the two reg entries to your x64 machine and add them to the registry (double click), dont forget to backup your registry before).

Start Lightscape and enjoy the dinosaurier. If its crashing, (only happens with vista x64) delete your "nvogl32.dll" in the windows\SysWOW64 folder and replace it with a older winxp x64 "nvogl32.dll".

Btw. I cant find the SP1 file (~3MB) for Lightscape, does anyone have a copy of it?
PS: Dschaga, nice to see you here , Can't wait to try your eScape powertool , nice one!

[Dschaga]

http://rapidshare.com/files/62095209/Lightscape32_SP1.exe.html

thanks for the info.

Escape should evolve in far future(christmas?) to a multithreaded rendertool which uses all cores for raytracing.

[Randy]

Wow, good news about Escape, sounds very promising. Now a smart recompile of the lsrad.exe and... just dreaming
Thank you Dschaga

[Dschaga]

well; i started a thread about the rewrite, over at cgarchitect, since this seems to be the last place where a few lightscape hardliners try at least to talk about lightscape

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/26468-...tml#post181035

[glorybound]

Lightscape

Dug up some of my Lightscape images. These must be 12 years old. I do remember that Lightscape didn't support bump maps. These are scans since I couldn't find the electronic ones.