Adam Billyard

Adam is the author of a plug-in for SketchUp which has taken the community by storm: LightUp, a new way for SketchUp users to display their models with real lighting and effects right inside SketchUp.

CatchUp: Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you and your background?

Adam Billyard: Hi, my name is Adam Billyard. I'm a Brit now living in Brighton, UK, but spent my teens growing up in Minnesota, USA. I started programming in 1976 on some of the very earliest home computers. Olivetti p101, SWTPC, Elf 2, Atari 800, Apple ][, RM 380Z, Atari ST, Amiga and on pretty much everything. Published my first game with Atari in 1982 and wrote a number of chart topping games. Started an architectural office layout business when I was 17 (running on a RadioShack Model 2) that automated Steelcase office layout and costing. After my PhD in London I started working for Canon Research while I was writing up. I demonstrated some of the first ever interactive 3D graphics running in software which Canon spun out into Criterion Software. Over 15 years we grew from 2 guys in a room to 250 people worldwide and tens of millions of turnover. Electronic Arts bought out Criterion in 2004 and I stayed on a while but left in early 2007.

CatchUp: How did you get involved with Ruby scripting for SketchUp?

Adam Billyard: When I first saw SketchUp in 2004, it was what I call a "TiVo moment". Its so obviously just a better way of doing things. You can quibble about UI / features etc. but its just 'better'. I toyed with integrating it into Games development but never got much traction / got distracted by other things. The other part of puzzle is that while at London university I'd been friends with Eliot Miranda - one of the foremost architects of Smalltalk implementations. I was knocked sideways by real object oriented programming so when Ruby came along with its simplicity and purity, I jumped at it. And Ruby + SketchUp? Whoa, we can do some cool stuff with this.

CatchUp: Ok let's talk about your plug-in for SketchUp, LightUp. What were your motivations to create this script and were you confident from the beginning it was going to work the way you intended it to?

Adam Billyard: LightUp came about because, like many before me, having done some nice models I was frustrated at the lack of lighting which gives so much atmosphere to a walkthrough. I began tinkering in 2007 with adding some lighting using Ruby scripts, drawing on my many years of games technology development, but having spent the last 15 years working my butt off I had thought I was finished with programming so I didn't take it very seriously.

But as things progressed I was pleasantly surprised to find I had real clarity as to how the technology should work and what it should do. So I kept going. I initially wrote the whole thing in Ruby script but it became clear that the serious number crunching that was required was not really