The pureLIGHT demo seems to be expired as soon as it's installed

#1 Yeah this is a strange bug that we have encountered with the trial version. Oddly, it tends to go away if you wait a day or so after installing it. We have never been able to reproduce this in-house so far, so we don't know what is exactly going on.

If you still have troubles after a day or so, send us an email at support@purelighttech.com and we'll see what we can do for you. We are all away on holidays until the 4th, so I can't promise any resolution before then.

There are no plans for a Macintosh version.

#2 Well I've tried again after a few days on both machine, with no luck. Both do have windows 7 installed. So I'll try and install my old copy of vista on a virtual Machine (Parallel on my Mac Pro) to see if I have better luck :)

In the mean time I did try to bake GI lighting the old fashion way for test purposes...Arggg. Even if I can do it with my existing 3D tools, it's so painful and troublesome I can see right away why I need your product. :)

Quick questions again if I may, one thing I did notice when trying the old fashion way is that I obviously have A LOT of control in a full blown renderer, would things like the amount of GI an object bounces off be adjustable, or the Gamma value at which the lighting is calculated?

A new work flow in 3D production is "Linear Workflow", allowing us to compensate for the 2.2 Gamma computer screen have and light in a much more realistic way. I would doubt this is possible, but for my work it would be quite awesome if it was :D

Thanks again,

Francois Beaudry
BLAST media

#3 Well it seems that Windows 7 was the issue, as it worked right away with Vista. Though I did also install Visual C++ 2005 and 2008 packages on Vista also, so that might have helped.

I did see that you can control the amount of light an object receives, it would be great if the amount of light it bounces back could also be controlled, this way if objects in a room are too dark, you could just fiddle with the amount of light being bounced back from the walls.

It seems impossible to use a linear work flow, but cheats could always be done to achieve it I guess. :)

When you export a scene to Torque, do the lights get sent also?(I didn't see them.) All the materials created from pureLIGHT are flat, without any specularity. I'd need to have the light sources also sent to torque if I want to add specular values to them once back in Torque.

It would still be possible for me to use Normal maps, reflections and specular map on a material that has a tone map, correct?

Francois Beaudry
BLAST media

#4 Hmm, Windows 7 shouldn't have been causing any problems, but, we'll take a look into that here. The needed Visual C++ packages are installed automatically by the pureLIGHT installers.

A scene exported to Torque doesn't currently have the lights exported as well. That is something that I want to add in though.

It is possible to use normal maps, reflections, specular maps and all that with tone mapped materials inside of Torque. If you have a look at the Burg demo scene that we created, we utilize those in it. You can set up those effects the same way that you normally would in Torque.

If you want to use a linear work flow, you can try replacing all of the tonemap[0] material entries with lightmap[0], which will get rid of the default exponential scaling that we use. Internally, all of the lighting is dealt with linearly until it becomes necessary to compress it down to the 0-1 range for export into the texture files.

Adding in controls for fiddling with the amount of light being bounced back is on my todo list.

#5 Hi Thomas, great to hear about the upcoming features.

I did take a look at the Burg demo scene, it does suffer from the same problem I had noticed with the DenGold scene, No Specular on Anything, so everything is a bit flat. Nothing seems shinny or reflective, it seems as if everything is made of a simple phong material.

On the Mac version of Torque, I had very little success with adding Spec as all I could do is turn it on, I couldn't adjust it's size and strenght and have it respect cast shadows, as they shine on both sides of the object. Hoppefully this is a Mac problem only. But then again it could be user error, as I'm just starting to play with this :D

#6 Hmm, I thought Burg had specular and normal maps enabled on it, maybe that's not in the version posted.

As for the Mac version of Torque, I can't speak towards that, never tried running Torque on a Mac. There could very well be some compatibility issues within Torque there.

#7 Burg has, or should have all the normal and spec maps. If not I'll poke Derek B. and get him to put up the proper version. The Den doesn't have any spec or normal maps.

#8 I did notice the normal maps, as they are quite apparent, but I don't see any specular effect on the machinery, the walls or the pipes.

I did notice some on the weapon the character uses though, but only on the PC version not on the Mac, which is a problem, but obviously not yours ;) I'll go seek some answers about that in the torque specific side of the forum.

I would love to see a version of Burg with Reflections and Highlights if possible. :)

Thanks for all the help guys.

#9 That's strange. In the 1.1 alpha all the normal and spec files are present and the materials seem to be set properly, but there may be some issue with the renderer.

#10 I guess it could be a graphic card issue, when I do have some time I'll try to do some test on another PC.

For now I've but the Visualization project on the back burner, as I have another project I need to finish first.

I'll report back in a month I guess if I still don't see the specs :)

Thanks again

#11 Any news on the evaluation version expiration bug with Windows 7? I just installed the evaluation demo version and got the expiration message straight away - so it seems it is still an issue.

#12 We still haven't been able to reproduce this bug in house, its extremely frustrating that way. I've looked over the relevant code and it all seems to be correct, so whatever it is, is extremely subtle.

#13 I managed to reproduce this bug in house, and I believe its fixed now. The fix will be in the next released version.

#14 Umm, is this fixed in the 1.4 trial? Just got this error myself at win7. Kinda annoying cuz i wanted to try it =/.

EDIT: Nvm, figured it out. For other people experiencing this, try to change date settings one day forward and wait one day until you change it back or for those who are patient, you can just wait one day i guess. Hope this problem will be solved in next release (btw. pureLIGHT looks awesome :D)

#15 This should have been fixed in the 1.4 trial version. If you have previously installed a trial copy you will still encounter difficulties.

#16 Just FYI, i had not installed any pureLIGHT trial before when this occured.

#17 I just installed the purelight trial edition and got an trial expired too...

I guess I was thinking about whether this piece of technology was worth using or not but so far I only have some videos on youtube and a "expired trail" demo to make my decisions on :O)

Link:
http://www.garagegames.com/products/download/447

I downloaded the pureLIGHT Demo

I am using Win 7 Ultimate edition English version. Any ideas why this happens?

Best,

Dwarf King

#18 Yup not even a reinstall from your main website would deal with this problem... Damn :o(