QLC+ 5 3D preview - LED bars!
Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2018 9:42 pm
Even though a huge QLC+ 4.12.0 has just been dropped, the works on QLC+ 5 keep going on!
This is the latest results you can achieve if you build the QLC+ sources today.
As promised during the 3D crowdfunding campaign, this is basically goal #2.
Eric worked on a so called "bloom" technique to simulate the typical effect LEDs do when hitting smoke particles suspended in the air.
Obviously we are not attempting to achieve photorealism, because that would require a monster CPU/GPU.
One example above all is "indirect light" which will probably be never supported.
In the real world, light bounces everywhere, especially if there are particles in the air. That would require an enormous amount of processing power to achieve what happens in reality.
Given this clarification, here's some considerations about the video above:
- as soon as I release QLC+ 5 alpha 4, I will share the 71kb project I used to record the video
- it's, again, a single Show, synced to music
- there are 5 universes, for a total of around 2000 DMX channels
- the equipment is: 4 x Clay Paky SuperSharpy, 17 x Stairville 240/8 LED bars, 6 x ADJ FREQ 16, a custom 30x15 RGB panel
- I made large use of RGB matrices, but this time I also used a couple of Sequences (therefore I fixed Sequence editing, yay!)
- I think the changes I've done in the QLC+ engine for multithreading are paying off. Again, I worked on a 6 years old i5 CPU, with a still powerful nVidia GTX 970 graphics card. Universe loads are nicely balanced on my CPU cores. With the 3D preview running, I measured around 30% of usage on all my 4 cores. Not bad at all I would say ! Imagine what the QLC+ engine can do without a preview running. I'd roughly say 10000 DMX channels could be feasible at this point
- this time I spent an awful amount of time to create the Show, cause at every step I found a bug...and fixed it! In the end, I've been able to achieve what I wanted.
- the 6 American DJ strobe bars gave me a hell of a time before they started working like in the real world !
- the 3D bloom effect depends on the smoke amount set. In the video it is set to 80%, that's why halos are quite large
- again, music composed by me (didn't put much effort on it this time lol)
In this video I wanted to show some "beam bars" as well. (like this)
All the code is in place to simulate them, but we stumbled on a nasty bug that prevents us to show them yet. Eventually I will find out what's going on (might be even a bug in the Qt3D internals..
) but for now, no joy.
Also, LEDs simulation doesn't stop to bars only. There are strips and tubes and sooner or later I will add them too.
In my opinion, the 3D preview is starting to be effective for many products on the market, and to be honest, I'm pretty happy about it.
What do you guys think ?
This is the latest results you can achieve if you build the QLC+ sources today.
As promised during the 3D crowdfunding campaign, this is basically goal #2.
Eric worked on a so called "bloom" technique to simulate the typical effect LEDs do when hitting smoke particles suspended in the air.
Obviously we are not attempting to achieve photorealism, because that would require a monster CPU/GPU.
One example above all is "indirect light" which will probably be never supported.
In the real world, light bounces everywhere, especially if there are particles in the air. That would require an enormous amount of processing power to achieve what happens in reality.
Given this clarification, here's some considerations about the video above:
- as soon as I release QLC+ 5 alpha 4, I will share the 71kb project I used to record the video
- it's, again, a single Show, synced to music
- there are 5 universes, for a total of around 2000 DMX channels
- the equipment is: 4 x Clay Paky SuperSharpy, 17 x Stairville 240/8 LED bars, 6 x ADJ FREQ 16, a custom 30x15 RGB panel
- I made large use of RGB matrices, but this time I also used a couple of Sequences (therefore I fixed Sequence editing, yay!)
- I think the changes I've done in the QLC+ engine for multithreading are paying off. Again, I worked on a 6 years old i5 CPU, with a still powerful nVidia GTX 970 graphics card. Universe loads are nicely balanced on my CPU cores. With the 3D preview running, I measured around 30% of usage on all my 4 cores. Not bad at all I would say ! Imagine what the QLC+ engine can do without a preview running. I'd roughly say 10000 DMX channels could be feasible at this point
- this time I spent an awful amount of time to create the Show, cause at every step I found a bug...and fixed it! In the end, I've been able to achieve what I wanted.
- the 6 American DJ strobe bars gave me a hell of a time before they started working like in the real world !
- the 3D bloom effect depends on the smoke amount set. In the video it is set to 80%, that's why halos are quite large
- again, music composed by me (didn't put much effort on it this time lol)
In this video I wanted to show some "beam bars" as well. (like this)
All the code is in place to simulate them, but we stumbled on a nasty bug that prevents us to show them yet. Eventually I will find out what's going on (might be even a bug in the Qt3D internals..
) but for now, no joy.Also, LEDs simulation doesn't stop to bars only. There are strips and tubes and sooner or later I will add them too.
In my opinion, the 3D preview is starting to be effective for many products on the market, and to be honest, I'm pretty happy about it.
What do you guys think ?