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Graphics Software

3D MAX To Laser Light 39

Posted by CmdrTaco from the welcome-to-the-plan-e-arium dept.
Laserfuzz writes: "Remember LaserMAME? Well this isn't new but Pangolin has a plug-in for 3D Studio MAX to convert 3D objects and scenes into laser outlines. Opens laser show programing to a larger group of people." I s'pose not everyone has that kind of hardware sitting around, but you sure could light up a party.
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3D MAX to Laser Light More

3D MAX to Laser Light

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  • Ah, Las Vegas... home to every convention known to man -- except, apparently, for the Geneva Convention [icrc.org].
  • I've seen it happen at a rave in Louisana before. Damn fucking cool, multi colored to boot.
  • I never found any true use for them. I guess if you were at any show and under the incredible influence of LSD then this would be enjoyable.

    At any other show I find them to be terribly annoying and distracting from the performers on stage.

    Why would I want even more tacked onto the cost of a ticket (TM, band fees are enough) just to see a bunch of shit that I can see while watching GForce for free.

    Just my worthless .02
  • I'm sure they do use software like that. Those shows cost millions of dollars, you think their going to scrimp on software?
  • Good laser shows aren't shown at concerts, they are shown at laser shows. The eye candy at concerts can be entertaining, but the stuff done for the sake of doing a good laser show can be really, really impressive.
  • It IS for Real Laser Projectors. It makes doing the Animation for them much easier.

  • Galvs expensive... (Score:4)

    by cr0sh ( 43134 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2001 @12:41PM (#78745) Homepage
    Make that with a capital "E"!

    Cheap galvs are going set you back at least $100.00 per channel (last time I checked) - and those aren't high speed, either (lotsa bucks for those). Pro laser show equipment is pricey - but it doesn't have to be this way for your next party.

    In an old back issue of Scientific American (in the late 70's-early 80's, I believe) there was an Amatuer Scientist article on building your own laser show cheaply - where the "galvs" were right angle/ortho mounted speakers with mirrors glued to the cone - the trick is using two mirror/speaker combos, each acting on the X or Y axis. The laser bounces between them, and the speakers control the deflection in the X and Y axis - tone generators control the speakers.

    The article also showed how to use two motors, each with a mirror glued to the shaft at an angle - using this arrangement, bouncing the laser between the mirrors, you can create lissajous patterns (fun to watch - I actually put an entry into the AOL CD contest that did this, but used the CDs as the mirrors). Add a motor spinning a "shutter" wheel (prior to the laser hitting the first mirror) for other effects. All the motors are controlled with rheostats.

    Other possibilities:

    Cut away the speaker cone to reduce its mass to get higher speed. It might also be possible to extend the shaft of a regular analogue voltmeter and superglue a small mirror onto it (might have to beef up the spring a bit). Use a solenoid to activate a shutter "digitally" (pro rigs use some kind of electro-optical shutter that works similarly to an LCD). I have given thought to using headphone style speakers, or gluing the mirror to a piezo speaker for higher speeds - haven't followed through on it yet, though.

    Use a PC (and accompaning sound card) to control the speaker "galvs" - the parallel port could control a solenoid shutter. Multiple shutters could be controlled serially. Mirrors could be mounted on servos for simple "sweep" effects.

    Buy the small mirrors at a craft store - they make them pretty small and lightweight. Another possibility for even lighterweight mirrors is to use a small piece of highly polished blank semiconductor wafer.

    Pen lasers (ie, LED lasers) can be used for small informal gatherings, but if you want to do a better, larger show, get an HeNe tube laser - output and brightness tends to be higher. Unfortunately you won't be able to get other colors without spending a lot of bucks (I think there is a blue or green laser pen out there, but it is expensive - other colored lasers are of the gas variety, and tend to be expensive). But other light effects could be used instead (maybe focused high-brightness LEDs?)...

    Have phun!

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
  • I'd rather see 3DSMax do laser 3D printing.

    The real name escapes me, but a laser beam is fired into a vat of photosensitive resin, where it hardens, and can create a perfect 3D mold. Anyone recall? Wired said Oakley uses this technology.

  • Real Genius, anyone??
  • No, no:

    It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

    Then, it's just a game: Find the Eye.

  • Re:Laser color matching (Score:4)

    by pongo000 ( 97357 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2001 @12:21PM (#78749)
    Apparently, there are some severe restrictions in the US with regard to laser intensity at various colors. He had to get a special permit to display his show in a public forum. You can find out about the standards here.

    And for a good reason [fda.gov]...

  • Spice up? It's pretty impressive as it is... when was the last time you went?

    BTW, I live about .8 miles from the park, so I see it quite often. :-)

    -pf

  • I see no evidence of any such thing on their website [calacademy.org]. Are you sure?

    The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
  • This seems to be possible, I found a page of someone who constructed his own laserbeam redirector, which is right here [amelink.net]. This brings the construction costs down to an acceptable level, but you have to (know someone who can and is willing to) build it.

  • Just a reminder (Score:5)

    by sandidge ( 150265 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2001 @11:49AM (#78753)
    It's all fun and games until someone's eye is burnt out with the laser. Then it's just fun you can't see.

  • Warez (Score:5)

    by bonzoesc ( 155812 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2001 @11:47AM (#78754) Homepage
    Too bad you can't get warez laser projectors like you can get warez 3DS. Then we could have lots of fun at night. More than usual, I mean.

    "Up there! It's a bird!"
    "It's a plane!"
    "IT'S A TEAPOT!!!!"

    Tell me what makes you so afraid
    Of all those people you say you hate

  • Well, here we are in the future - wheres my jet-pack? ..

    This reminds me a bit of a program I had way back when on my Amiga 2000 that would output audio signals to create patterns with a laser scanner. By far the simpler and cheaper route to go is to get yourself a cheap surplus laser and clue a non-flat mirror to a motor shaft.. By playing around with the angle of the mirror you can adjust the projected pattern.. Not nearly as high-tech, but cheap and cheerful for the party wall..

  • you can get a scanner for between $300 & $500. Note that this does NOT include the laser or the chassis, which can run you MUCH MUCH more depending on the laser power. IF you already have a cheep laser, you can rig up one of these on a homemade chassis and use it with software like the one in this story.

    http://www.camtech.com/ [camtech.com]

    www.gsilumonics.com [gsilumonics.com]

    other sources and info from this page [pangolin.com].

  • no but really, why do "copy and paste the links" posts still get modded up? have we not evolved people


    NEWS: cloning, genome, privacy, surveillance, and more! [silicongod.com]

  • Converting 2-D into laser outlines (Score:3)

    by Mudd Chick ( 207628 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2001 @12:06PM (#78758) Homepage
    Oddly enough, the college Clinic project I worked on last year was an attempt to convert a picture of a two-dimensional pattern to a laser pattern. I can't be too specific since the patent application is still being processed, but you can see a very brief project statement at HMC's Clinic Page [hmc.edu] (look under Oregon Medical Laser Center) Our main problem was in eliminating distortion, as we were on a limited budget and had to buy a consumer digital camera to take pictures of our sample. Also, none of us had had experience with image processing, so it was a bit of a pain. This plugin seems like it could be very useful for those in the laser marking business, as they won't have to draw extremely complicated 3D objects themselves in order to get the pattern they want to mark -- but they would need to have a 3D model of it.
  • I can picture Taco at a party with his laser light show machine having an exchange something like this:

    Taco: When an electron drops from an outer to an inner level, excess energy is given off as light. The wavelength or color of the emitted light is precisely related to the amount of energy released.
    Cute Girl: Eh!
    Taco: Yes...what is it, what, what is it?
    Cute Girl: Can I play with it?
    Taco: No you can't play with it. You won't enjoy it on as many levels as I do... The colors!
  • How about a laser show of the starship Enterprise?

  • A little more info on this.

    Yes, laser projectors are hellishly expensive, one of the reasons there are so few in the US (that are any good). You try precisely moving a very small point of light around at incredible speeds with all sorts of sharp angles and see what sort of accuracy you get.

    And that says nothing for the cost of the laser itself. Or just the amount of power and water most ion lasers need if you want to be able to have it bright enough to see outside. Plus all of the special crystals and optics needed for color changing, provided you can even afford a laser with multiple wavelengths.

    Now, one reason the LCMax plug-in rocks is because it saves you some money on the production end. Just about every US laser company uses Pangolin software. Typically a show is created as traditional frame by frame animation and then hand traced on a digitizing tablet into Pangolin. Frame by Frame!!

    Max changes all this by making it easy to create simple objects and rotates in laser light with out all of the time consuming digitizing. If you see the Hershey Park show or SeaWorld Orlando you will be able to pick out the parts where LC Max was doing the work. The images have a really clean, distinct look to them.

    Laser light is absolutely incredible. There really is nothing else like it in color or intensity. And believe it or not 3D studio and LCmax are just drops in the bucket once you put a full power system together. Hopefully it will help laser companies get out of the rut they seem to be stuck in (at least stateside) and start pushing the boundaries of this amazing art form again. Because honestly, most US laser shows these days suck like a hoover.

  • Anyone know of a good source for the hardware needed to do that??
  • This would be cool as hell at a rave! :)
  • 'd rather see 3DSMax do laser 3D printing. The real name escapes me, but a laser beam is fired into a vat of photosensitive resin, where it hardens, and can create a perfect 3D mold. Anyone recall? Wired said Oakley uses this technology. Stereolithography Here's a commercial site that explains a few of the concepts and has a few pics. http://www.stereolithography.com/ There are a few machines around, there may be one at a university near you.
  • Anybody ever been to Stone Mountain in Atlanta, GA? They run the same show every night for months at a time, I bet they'd love some software like this to spice up the act relatively inexpensively.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  • Laser color matching (Score:5)

    by MajorBurrito ( 443772 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2001 @11:53AM (#78766)
    I have a friend who made a laser light show for a 4th of July festival. He had a heck of a time getting the colors to come out right. Apparently, there are some severe restrictions in the US with regard to laser intensity at various colors. He had to get a special permit to display his show in a public forum. You can find out about the standards here [fda.gov].

    Now, this is some very cool stuff. I've actually seen him make holograms using his laser projector. But if you want to do anything out in public, you'll need to be sure you have the right papers.
  • Hmmm, Quake III on Laserlight...
    Yummie, yummie!
  • Lava lamps are better than big lasers while tripping. And staring at your hand is better than a lava lamp, keep it simple;) Big lasers distract way too much anyway!
    ---

  • Lasers (Score:3)

    by enigmabomb ( 459926 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2001 @11:42AM (#78769) Homepage
    I dont understand how this would be useful? Sure this software costs like 11,000000 but still, why would anyone want to SIMULATE lasers. It loses all the stuff i like lasers for.

  • Talk about crazy ideas: you can join in this project...
  • Over 3 years ago, a respected flash RAM maker claimed its newest creation was been equipped w/ 2 units capable together of 1.2 GFLOPS @ 300 MHz.
    - 1.2 GFLOPS???
    - Quake II over 100 fps?
    - MP3 encoding quick as thunder?
    - 3D studio rendering over 5 complex scenes per min?
    The 1st and 2nd has been shown to be true (or almost), but the 3rd... (the 1st GFLOPS running 3D studio probably came from an 1.3 GHz Athlon, if exists a 3D studio version that runs on Alpha - Alpha+WinNT? maybe... -, so CRAY machines held the crown)
    Later the best-seller chipset and proeminent network adapter manufacturer launched a CPU that it claims way similar architeture, but way improved to single-unit implementaion than its dual-unit rival. Improved implementation? Now 3D studio like other CAD nightmares will run ultra-faster. Oh no... won't? Why?
    - Only single-precision ops?
    - Poor instruction decode performance and insufficient data bandwidth?
    - No compilers for best optmization and waaaay hard to do hand picked enhancements?
    The 3 objectives are true, so there are faulty engineering dept.'s. But the newer super-whooper CPUs also have problems to achieve max. performance. There are more?
    - Software developers fall over the junk of x86 and x87 instruction sets.
    - The own Frankenstein manufacturers doesn't know the best way possible for optimum perfomance on complex apps.
    - Vicious double-precision per op use which came from the era 80-bit and 64-bit ops used rather minor precision on professional CAD (even poor physics-based CAD), home CAD, 3D modeling for macro architeture and engineering cuz' they're patterned by reference tasks that effectively needed higher precision (lab research and manufacturing industry, by example). Also, to increase precision in "single-instruction-single-data" was easier than increase FLOPS.
    Ok, SIMD-FP (there is the name) this time sux (P5 FPU scked for over 4 years, K6 FPU still sux), is either manufacturers' fault like softhouses' fault.

    But they at least wouldn't dare to respect the measure "GFLOPS"?
  • Laser show programming? Almost nobody hasd the equipment for that, and if they do, they probably already have the tools to program it. This definitely isn't something that most people should care about. Why is this posted on slashdot, instead of some laser show programmers newsgroup? Is is a slow news day?

    Or was CmdrTaco assimilated?

    "I am CmdrTaco of Borg. Relevance is irrelavent. You will be annoyed by pointless articles."
    ;)
  • LC-Max is a very cool product. I beta test it for the Pangolin guys, and love it! I was actually using this product when one of my co-workers said slashdot had a post on it. It is a great tool for merging the CG look with the brilliance of laserlight. I can't draw to save my life, but I am able to easily create 3D animations and view them almost instantly in laser. You can see some of the imagery I've created if you go to Hearshey Park, PA. We have this product available, and custom build the most advanced laser projectors in the world. For more info contact AVI at 407-859-8166
  • On the acceleration/deceleration... Yes, there is an algorythm built into the LC-Max plugin that allows for acc/dec and adds the extra points where needed, but it actually does much more than that. You can control the number of points on angles between certain degrees, and there are several buttons that allow you to auto setup the smoothness of an image based on what it's geometry is, such as a square, sphere, cylendar, hedra, etc.

    As for the refresh rate, it will maintain a constant rate if you tell it to maintain a constant # of points per frame.

    For different scanners, you are best programming for that particular model of scanner. This is true with analog abstracts, as well as graphics, on many of the scanners I've seen.

    Alot has changed at AVI since 1990 I came on in '94, and so much has improved that we don't even want to play back the old stuff. The scanners have gotten faster, the images have gotten more complex, and we can now cover the entire dome with our Omniscan projector.

    hope that helped!


  • Hey there anon.c .. I'd look again .. it spelled correctly.

  • There are also output plugins for -- (Score:3)

    by martinbogo ( 468553 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2001 @11:45AM (#78776) Homepage Journal

    LightWave, Maya, and good old POV-RAY. This is nothing terribly new, but it's nice to see that someone has taken the time to put together a plug in for 3DMAX, which is one of the most used (aka most pirated) pieces of 3D software out there.

    By the way .. if you love good laser shows, the San Francisco Planetarium is now showing a great laser show based on Rocky Horror. Plays Fri at Midnight, call the planetarium for showtimes.

    Unfortunately, the De Anza planetarium has cancelled all laser shows at the Minolta planetarium until further notice. It was one of the last good places to see the Pink Floyd laser show.

  • Laser light show equipment suppliers (Score:5)

    by martinbogo ( 468553 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2001 @12:11PM (#78777) Homepage Journal
    New Method Laser Systems [laser-light-show.com]

    The Laserist Marketplace [wa.org]

    Cosmic Ray [cosmicray.com]

    Spectra Physics [spectraphysics.com]

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