Open Source Lighting Design Program

[j_pilborough]

Hi All, hope this hasn't been mentioned before.

 

After putting in 'cad' and 'lighting' to Sourceforge I found a program called litedesign. http://litedesign.sourceforge.net/

 

It seems to be under active development(last release 11 days ago) and it has the usual placing, setting types and gels, slightly less usual 2d preview and the ability to use a background image but most amazingly a basic 3d preview of your lighting plan. It insn't ready for use quite yet, though it works, however as far as I know attempting this is a first in the history of free lighting design programs.

[musht]

This looks quite neat, slight lack of help files though.

 

Anther very useable free 3d design tool, not stage specific but lot of prebuilt lighting and stage models around, is Google Sketchup, free version of main Sketchup app:

 

www.sketchup.com

 

Using a plug in called SU2K can render photorealistic scenes in Kerkythea, a free ray tracing renderer, which will accept multiple coloured light sources, plug in has primitive omni and spot sources that you can adjust:

 

www.kerkythea.org

[dravenzouk]

I've been recently toying around with Sunlite's Magic3D (which is a very cool 3d visualizer) along with Freestyler - both of which can be downloaded for free. The Magic 3D was pretty buggy to start with but with a bit of tooling around, I've got it work great and does everything I need.

 

d.

[DavidLee]

I found a program called litedesign.

 

It insn't ready for use quite yet, though it works, however as far as I know attempting this is a first in the history of free lighting design programs.

It doesn't work at all on my PC. I assume that it requires the latest version of Java to be installed - however I know that that will break existing Java applications that I want to continue to be able to use so this program is totally useless to me.

 

David