Lightscape

[Dschaga]

One of my last Lightscape Projects was a vrml of the FLUC2 project in vienna.


I'm really proud of my work there, because i have the feeling that the interactivety of lightscape and then the vrml pushed the project in the directon it needed to become real

More informations here at the Architects webpage:
http://www.splus.at/phtml/index.php
And here the really ugly but unique webpage of the Fluc project/club:
http://www.fluc.at

Here the vrml
http://www.cgtechniques.com/temp/fluc2/
..you may need cortona to see it

[Frances]

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...

According to a guy named David Em, LST abandoned the Unix platform in favor of Windows NT in 1996.

When I purchased Lightscape 3.0 in 1997, the price was $495 USD, and I bought it directly from Lightscape Technologies. It was only available for Win95/NT, not Unix. Later that year, LST was aquired by Discreet Logic. Discreet released LS 3.1 soon thereafter. Radioray was not integrated into VIZ 4. This is from an archive of Autodesk news releases:

Lightscape to Replace RadioRay® As Discreet’s Product of Choice for Lighting Design and Effects—Discreet announced that it has terminated its publishing relationship with the authors of RadioRay, and that Lightscape will replace RadioRay in the Discreet product line. Lightscape, the industry leader in photorealistic architectural rendering and lighting simulation, interoperates with both 3D Studio MAX and 3D Studio VIZ software. Registered RadioRay customers will be allowed to upgrade to upcoming versions of Lightscape.

I remember emailing someone at Discreet after they were aquired by Autodesk, and expressing my relief that they had decided to keep LS instead of Radioray. Not that I had anything against Radioray, but LS was my product of choice at the time.

[Dschaga]

well .. you are right... i obviously was talking about the price of lightscape 2 or earlier when a unix version was also available - it's too long ago to remember all in details.

about radioray:
We tested it for our local distributor and it had the same problems then later theviz4 radiosity. The first iteration was very very very slow, it sometimes drops the percentage(?), it uses too much memory and it generated too many triangles. Everything of the viz4 radiosity looked like radioray...