LX Studio: Tools for 3D Lighting | Hacker News Reader

LX Studio: Tools for 3D Lighting

lx.studio

82 pointskaycebasques12 comments

We use LX Studio extensively for the LED visuals at our immersive audio venue in San Francisco, Envelop SF (http://envelop.us). It's been rock solid for 7 years. Highly recommended.

Would love to see more open source competitors in this space. I was excited when I saw a Github link, but that's basically hosting just a README and the only one I know of is GeoPix [0], but to be fair I haven't used either LX Studio or GeoPix. LX Studio does look exciting though, I will evaluate it on my next LED mapped project. A few projects I've done in the past have been playing with Enttec ELM [1] which is also not open source (but does not have a vague license like LX Studio and is fairly priced). A really neat feature of that software though is you can map GLSL shaders over your stages.

[0] GeoPix: https://github.com/EnviralDesign/GeoPix

[1] ELM: https://www.enttec.com/product/dmx-lighting-control-software...

The majority of the source code is publicly available, though no longer under a traditional open source license. Over time I came to realize I was not really cool with it being used commercially or rebranded without me having some say in that.

The core engine code (pure Java, no UI dependencies) is here: https://github.com/heronarts/LX

The Processing-based UI layer is here: https://github.com/heronarts/P4LX

My future version is moving to a UI based upon LWJGL + bgfx, as the project sort of outgrew Processing as it's become a full application.

This new UI layer is here: https://github.com/mcslee/GLX

I don't publish the code for all the application scaffolding and UI implementation, though everything's designed for extensibility and a sort of plug-in model where having access to that shouldn't be necessary to be able to use and customize the application's behavior.

As referenced in my other comment, this new version should hopefully be available by end of year and will be called Chromatik: https://chromatik.co/ - this will include more documentation! And the goal is for it to be easier to use, no IDE/GitHub required (that will still be available for those who want it), with simpler end-user licensing as found in typical media production software.

The actual source code is hosted on separate repos I believe: https://github.com/heronarts/LXStudio-IDE

Even this appears to just be a limited source repo containing just the most basic UI components. Also, per the README:

> Please note that LX Studio is not open-source software.

Ahh good catch, I just glanced at the repo and assumed it contained source code but it looks like its just a bunch of jars: https://github.com/heronarts/LXStudio-IDE/tree/master/lib

We use LXS for our art car Titanic's End. It's one of the largest LXS deployments. We love it and plan on continuing to build on it.

Github: https://github.com/titanicsend/LXStudio-TE

IG for the project: https://www.instagram.com/titanicsend/

Mark here, creator of LX - thanks for posting! Apologies for the not-so-great state of that website and lack of documentation. I'm working on a proper repackaging and release of the application, rebranded as Chromatik, which should be a lot easier to learn and use. As with all software projects ever, this has taken longer than anticipated... hoping to have this finally out by end of calendar year.

User documentation is largely ready, but this website is still pre-official-launch: https://chromatik.co/guide/

Will reply to some of the other comments re: source etc. directly. And happy to answer any other questions about the project.

This looks insanely cool, thanks for sharing!

I'm curious to find resources on learning this tool however I was only able to find the tutorials from LXStudio.

Is anyone using this software in production and can comment on its experience vs. TouchDesigner? TouchDesigner's node system always pissed me off, as it felt like an unnecessary barrier that just made things harder.

Also in general, any VJs on hacker news?

EDIT: Some more instructions to run the application would be great, after loading the project locally and running `mvn validate`, I'm seeing the program execute but nothing is showing up on my screen.

I heard about LXS yesterday at the Burning Man Decompression event in SF. One of the creators [1] of the ladybug LED art installation told me that the ladybug is running LXS. They seemed friendly so you could probably totally just email them [2] for their take on LXS.

[1] https://www.lookingup.art/

[2] Or drop by there studio next weekend - sounds like they're having an open house

Seems to be an issue with the latest macOS update, they had similar issues in macOS Ventura and I copied the fix over for macOS Sonoma and was able to see the IDE after running from IntelliJ.

Check out the PR if you're interested: https://github.com/heronarts/LXStudio/issues/6#issuecomment-...

Thank you for that. As mentioned in some other comments, I've given up continuing to use Processing as an underlying application UI framework. It's unclear how long the OpenGL dependency is going to survive on macOS, or that Processing will have the dev resources to break the hard OpenGL dependency (sad side-thread on that topic: https://twitter.com/ben_fry/status/1709400641456501020)

Future version based upon lwjgl+bgfx will be more broadly available soon.

In the meantime thx for the quick fix!

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