Here's a set of macros that I've been working on for a while, and 
finally feel like I can submit. It effectively allows you to place 
standard theatrical instruments in your scene, and attach various 
accessories (colors, template patterns, etc).
I tried to make everything in here as realistic as possible, in terms of 
photometric data, and left a lot of room for modification and expansion. 
It uses LightSysIV (and CIE.inc) from Jaime for color and fading 
calculations.

Color filters (Gels in the technical lingo) were modeled by taking the 
transmission spectra for each color in spline form and passing it 
through CIE to create colors as accurately as possible. The lamps 
themselves use the rated blackbody temperatures of the real lamps, so 
anything made in this should look nearly identical to what it looks like 
in person, within gamma and monitor calibration tolerances.

The zip file contains a folder that contains the main include file, a 
sample proscenium theatre space to test lights in, a wooden stick figure 
to test with, transmission spectrum data for 3 major manufacturers of 
gels, a fairly detailed readme with usage instructions, and a few demo 
scenes to try.

Let me know what you think!

cshake

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Attachments:
Download 'theatresys_1.0.zip' (381 KB)

CShake <cshake+pov### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>
> Let me know what you think!
>
> cshake

I did one short test...
.... and I believe that you have done a hard and complex work!
.... and I think you got a good result.
;-)

--
Carlo

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CShake wrote:
> Here's a set of macros that I've been working on for a while, and 
> finally feel like I can submit. It effectively allows you to place 
> standard theatrical instruments in your scene, and attach various 
> accessories (colors, template patterns, etc).
> I tried to make everything in here as realistic as possible, in terms of 
> photometric data, and left a lot of room for modification and expansion. 
> It uses LightSysIV (and CIE.inc) from Jaime for color and fading 
> calculations.
> 
> Color filters (Gels in the technical lingo) were modeled by taking the 
> transmission spectra for each color in spline form and passing it 
> through CIE to create colors as accurately as possible. The lamps 
> themselves use the rated blackbody temperatures of the real lamps, so 
> anything made in this should look nearly identical to what it looks like 
> in person, within gamma and monitor calibration tolerances.
> 
> The zip file contains a folder that contains the main include file, a 
> sample proscenium theatre space to test lights in, a wooden stick figure 
> to test with, transmission spectrum data for 3 major manufacturers of 
> gels, a fairly detailed readme with usage instructions, and a few demo 
> scenes to try.
> 
> Let me know what you think!
> 
> cshake

Looks promising and I'm glad someone could make some use of my old CIE 
include file. Which reminds of the lack of a *real* documentation for it 
and I guess the purpose and usage of CIE.inc is quite difficult to 
understand. I'm sorry for this and I always wanted to write a tutorial & 
documentation but never had the time for it. RL - you know.

-Ive

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CShake <cshake+pov### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Here's a set of macros that I've been working on for a while, and
> finally feel like I can submit. It effectively allows you to place
> standard theatrical instruments in your scene, and attach various
> accessories (colors, template patterns, etc).

Having *tried* to work out just the rudiments of something like this myself, I
can only say THANKS and CONGRATS on putting it all together. Not an easy task!!
I will definitely be checking it all out, for practical use (in pre-designing
the stage lighting for local theater plays that I'm involved with.)

One question of curiosity (a practical one, actually): What assumed_gamma is
*best* for using this package?  I.e., while designing this and working it out,
which assumed_gamma did you use? I want to make sure I follow your lead.

KW

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Kenneth wrote:
> Having *tried* to work out just the rudiments of something like this myself, I
> can only say THANKS and CONGRATS on putting it all together. Not an easy task!!
> I will definitely be checking it all out, for practical use (in pre-designing
> the stage lighting for local theater plays that I'm involved with.)
Thanks! There are still some issues, but I tried to make it as usable as 
possible for different applications (especially with the global unit 
system).

> One question of curiosity (a practical one, actually): What assumed_gamma is
> *best* for using this package?  I.e., while designing this and working it out,
> which assumed_gamma did you use? I want to make sure I follow your lead.
> 
> KW
> 
I've been running everything with assumed_gamma=1 on my PC for 3.6, and 
removed the statement in 3.7 due to it being deprecated, both of which 
produce the same results. I still notice that everything gets brighter 
when I switch to my mac (mostly dark lights become visible, etc), but 
the color mixes themselves stay the correct color, only a small amount 
brighter. With 3.7 I leave the gamma correction turned on, and that 
works fine. The difference in brightness between mac/pc shows up if I 
take the rendered images over from PC to mac, I haven't compared images 
generated on both.

The more important part (for correct colors) is setting the global 
whitepoint, which I hardcoded into the .inc file to be D50 (after 
comparing the renders to photographs of the real lights). D55 also looks 
decent, but setting it down as low as blackbody(5200) (the color of the 
light sources themselves) makes it all look weird.
It is set right at the top of theatresys.inc, and you can just comment 
that out if you wish to use a different environment.

cshake

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