Lighting controls?

I'm wondering if Grasshopper can talk to the lighting in a scene. I would like to make a rough model of a hall interior and the set various lights such as up lights pointing at the ceiling and ceiling mounted lights bouncing onto the walls.

Then I'd like to use some control method to look at the lighting and show crossfades and so on. 8 channels of light, 40 or more actual lamp positions.

I even have a Berhinger 2000 (Midi controller) with faders and dials if anybody has done MIDI->grasshopper messaging. Mouse control of inputs would be adequate. Probably want to make some control logic in Grasshopper to have 'Preset' positions that can be faded between.

I appreciate any pointers in advance.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on August 13, 2010 at 8:39am

In theory, its certainly possible, however its likely going to have to "bake" the light in question. The other thing is that it will likely only work on native Rhino lights, so if your using another render engine it may not be possible to modify the light in a way that your render engine will recognize. That will depend on which engine your using though. I did take a quick look at getting this to work, but didn't get it up an running. I'll take another look later.

Currently I'm working on getting MIDI support into gHowl, and interop project that Luis Fraguada, Giulio Piacentino, and myself have been working on. I was doing some work on it last week, but have unfortunately run into some computer trouble this week. Can I assume that you're looking for Control messages and not all that concerned about Note On/Off or Pitch Bend messages?

Permalink Reply by Alastair Leith on August 13, 2010 at 8:53am

Yes, not sure what the fader, dial and switch messages are called but it isn't a keyboard it's a MIDI mixer: http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/BCF2000.aspx

I looked at your page and see you are supporting OSC, I can send and receive both OSC and MIDI (and ArtNet & more) within Quartz Composer (yeah OS X ;-) ) so I can make an OSC control device or a straight OSC broadcaster from MIDI signals in QC.

I'm fine about doing the lighting inside Rhino if Rhino can redraw fast enough, it's just for prototyping, visualisation kind of thing. Rhino is just coming over to Mac and Grasshopper isn't there yet, but are you going to offer multi-platform support for gHowl?

How could you bake so many different light setups and use them all in one scene, what engine would you recommend to do something like that?

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on August 13, 2010 at 10:05am

You can receive MIDI messages through OSC, but AFAIK its not native and you have to go through several steps. Receiving the messages natively is what I'm working on so you can just plugin your MIDI controller and go.

gHowl can work on a Mac, but it depends on what you use. I'm not sure if the Midi library that I'm using will work on a Mac. It really comes down to how good Mono is, and since I don't have a Mac and don't know all that much about Macs/Mono, I'm not entirely sure.

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