Blackkettle

The post is here.

So, I’m trying to map a video texture onto a Xaml surface. So far, so easy. Except I want to apply the diffuse data to the emissive channel, because that’s closer to the way LightWave works. This is fine with static textures, but there’s a problem with videos. I generate as much as possible in a ResourceDictionary, and the relevant Xaml looks a little like this:

<VisualBrush x:Key="media_element" Opacity="1.0">
  <VisualBrush.Visual>
    <MediaElement Source="#filename#" />
  </VisualBrush.Visual>
</VisualBrush>
<DiffuseMaterial Brush="{StaticResource media_element"} />
<EmissiveMaterial Brush="{StaticResource media_element"} />

The problem is that even when I specify that the DiffuseMaterial and EmissiveMaterial brushes point to the same element, they get their own players which don’t start in sync, so you get ghosting and funky audio ringing. I can’t see an obvious way around this… Anyone?

Ok, it looks like I was wrong in my previous post. I can’t see an obvious way to launch a plugin on load in Layout. There’s a button to set it up in Modeler, though… Why the difference? I’m going to have a delve into the depths of the Layout config files to see if there’s anything obvious I’ve missed.

I’m a great believer in unit testing, and test-first development. Unfortunately, the concept of automated testing doesn’t sit especially well with developing LightWave plugins (as I am with Shaxam). This project is an attempt to answer that. (more…)

This project is at the “wouldn’t it be cool” stage so far. The idea is to compile Ruby as a LightWave plugin, and add an extension to give it access to the LightWave SDK. This would make it a feasible alternative to LScript for prototyping, which I can’t help but see as a good thing. There’s also the outside possibility of being able to use RubyInline (or something related) to generate actual compiled plugin code, which I think would be outstanding.

More on this as it happens. I might have a little play today, and see what I can see.

Well, I finally got round to it – I’ve released a rubygem for loading Lightwave objects in Ruby.  It’s not especially fast (not too slow either, though…), but it is pretty well tested.  It’s been sitting behind the web converter at shaxam.com for a little while, so I figured I’d get it out there.