using Blender 3D modeller to create laser animations?

[dream]

EDIT: The way some of the members here have desperately tried to identify my location and nationality for whatever reason they believed was needed for by asking an admin to check my profile logs and researching me by the content of my posts has been very creepy and unnecessary. So bye.

[colouredmirrorball]

Hi,

I'm by no means a Blender expert, but I tried some simple things as an experiment and it worked.
Blender has ways to export data as vector art, namely dxf. This can be loaded into laserboy (free) or Ild Sôs, and converted to laser art.
I'm not familiar with your method of creating outlines from a 3D model but I'm intrigued. Not sure if it is possible to convert your result to dxf or svg images directly in Blender... I only managed to convert vertices.



EDIT: because Dream for whatever reason damaged all his posts and because this thread shows up as third result when you google "Blender laser plugin", here is a very relevant link:

Blender plugin that renders an animation to DXF files based on Freestyle, by TL:
http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...396#post291396

[colouredmirrorball]

AFAIK only Ild Sos is capable of that, not Laserboy. Not sure how well the Pangolin stuff can do it. But you can convert svg images to dxf using free programs (such as Inkscape) so Laserboy can handle them.
True, DXF only saves the vertices, but it should be enough for laser projections. Effects like smoke, rain and fire are better done with 3D objects as blurry lines are difficult to trace. But in Ild Sos you can batch convert several dxf files to a single ilda file so you can get animations after all (not sure if Laserboy can do that?). It's a bit of a workaround but that's what you get for trying it for free :P

[swamidog]

there's a very handy app called "Lasercam Pro" that can scrape a movie playing in a window (or use live video feed) and turn it into an ILDA stream. it would have no problems with an animation like this.

i use it to create video sequences in my laser shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emqCtiAuBWY

http://www.blender.org/

Blender is a 3d modelling and animating software. It's amazing what this program can do because it's totally free. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XZGulDxz9o

I've been using Blender for plush toy designs and similar stuff. Because the rendering can be "programmed", you can easily get black and white outline animation renders which I hope can be turned into idl frames. I'm very new to laser projectors, haven't gotten one yet, but soon will and know very little on the IDL format and ways of creating them, and hope you guys can help me figure out how I can use Blender to create idl animations for projectors.

Blender can render animations as numbered PNG, JPG or BMP files, as well as AVI and other video formats. As I understand IDL format is vector based graphics formats when Blender only generates raster graphics formats. So I'm already guessing some extra program will need to be used after Blender has done most of the work. Any suggestions?

Here's a simple animation I made in Blender which I hope to get in a usable format used by projectors:


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For anyone interested, this is how I got Blender to render my scene as black and white outline frame/animation:


1) Delete all object materials, create new White color ones, set them to "Shadeless".
2) Enable the Postprocessing Effect "Edge" rendering (aka cartoon outline)

3) Set the World horizon and zenith color to white as well.

You will end up with something like this if you have an object and a camera in your scene:


4) There are many outlines inside the object which have different thickness. To remove them and simplify the frames I used the Node Editor to erode the image (thicken the outline) and add lots of contrast to remove the extra thin lines.




It's not perfect and I guess you can erase some unnecessary white parts in the frames with an image editor.
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So what now guys?
I'm hoping there's some program out there that can take a simple black and white image like this and dump IDL files

[swamidog]

there's also a thread that i started here about doing free bitmap to ilda:

http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...326#post223326

That's a very interesting software! And 39$ seems like a reasonable price. At first I thought this application did conversion in realtime which I didn't like the idea of to be honest as I wasn't sure my netbook could handle that at reasonable speed. But this page, http://innolasers.com/ebay/laser_diode/LaserCam.php ,says "Export ILDA 0,1,2,5". If it can export and allow me to play pre-made ILDA animations, then I'll get it.

I don't think we should stop here though.
Blender is a free program and I think if there are alternative ways to do this, especially if they are free, we should let others know of them.
For example I just found this freeware: http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...nversion/page2

Maybe there's more. I'll keep searching. You guys let me know if you know of any

[colouredmirrorball]

It used to, but it got moved to the innolasers.com site, http://innolasers.com/ebay/laser_diode/ILD_SOS.php

[colouredmirrorball]

Also, this has been done before, but the plugin is outdated...

http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...er-for-ILD-SÔS

[OldNo7]

If you export an animation as an avi that is a silhouette of your original you could then use OpenLase to trace the video on the fly and play the sound track.

Original video
Laser output

[mixedgas]

If you have funding, take a look at the Pangolin Plug-ins or HB laser's Utopia.

Steve

[OldNo7]

Openlase has a simulator also.