scottmoore

I am still on VW2017, but the DLVP is the way I handle these types of things. It’s quite beneficial for other reasons as well. Asssuming you might have truss, lighting, video, scenics etc on a truss, the DLVP allows you to move and rotate in 3D space the entire structure and contents regardless of what classes are turned on. It also allows for a simple way to detail automation. If a truss moves during a show all you need is to duplicate your viewport and move it into any position you want. Then, class your viewports by position. Simple.

Sam, That is indeed true and works for a lot of parameters, but not for turning lights on and off (which, of course one can do from the visualization palette), enabling lit fog or adjusting intensity. It seems a quite tedious that these functions are only available one light at a time.

Often I do have multiple design layer viewports and I am sure that this is an issue with redraw. I accept that as the nature of using DLVPs. Good call by the way. I do do a lot of extremely large scale renders for stadiums and occasionally larger venues. When doing these it requires a lot of lighting fixtures to look like anything worthwhile. In those instances I have generally not needed DLVPs as the goal was to see the entire site as opposed to some complicated stage rig. When changing views I can often watch the processor draw out each lighting fixture. My solution for these renders is to create "dumb" lighting symbols. These are simply hybrid symbols with a pre determined focus angle and color. I drop them in the drawing and rotate as required. Much faster when you are needing dozens of active lights in a rendering. Not ideal but WAY faster.

Two things that need to be addressed immediately (IMO of course) is the desire to make changes to multiple fixtures as the OP is suggesting and the ability to add pan and tilt values manually without always having to use focus points. Good lord that gets so tedious. I also tend to think it slows down re-draws and may have something to do with the need to often refresh instruments. I have no way to prove this, but if I create a generic lighting symbol without turning it into a lighting device, redraws are much, much faster.

This has been an ongoing request. The same applies to the "lit fog" toggle and probably every other parameter in that window. Very frustrating. My workaround is simply to get one light set up the way I want and then duplicate. Once duplicated you can add gobos, change color and focus points. There re is a thread running in the wishlist section about major improvements needed for Spotlight and it goes way beyond this. Spotlight needs a serious overhaul.

I am still on 2017, but this sounds to me like it is a much better solution. I never understood why it is (or was) that you could only replace a lighting device with the active symbol. To me, that caused a stop in workflow as I had to go in and make a fixture active, then deselect the insertion tool, select the fixture in question and then select replace with active from the OIP. It sounds like you developed a workflow to address this which is good. I have always found it clunky.

I may be completely missing your point, but it seems like perhaps you should simply reference the venue drawing in each of your lighting plots.

I would sure like to know more about that.

I'll do that Sam. You've always done great work. Thank you.

Is this additional loci for setting the physical light object? For example, moving the light object further back in the instrument?

Peter, I see you are an apprentenice. Would that be a sorcerer's apprentice? Nice image props!

I was really keen on creating 3D truck packs but have now abandoned that approach in favor of simple plan views. I layout three iterations of a trailer and denote them as "first row", "second row" and third row. It's much quicker and I have found that crews generally understand it more quickly. When I was doing 3D views, I would render the entire truck in right isometric but then I would create three additional drawing that dealt with the truck broken up into thirds. Then each row was "exploded" so that everyone could see exactly how things packed. That turned into a ton of work on large shows so I find the plan view to be clear in a single drawing and much faster to produce. All of that said, I would like to see what Sam has developed.

It's nice to learn new things.

I am with Josh. I would create a graphic that already had a color effect applied to it. If if you don't have Photoshop or a similar program, I would recommend Pixelmater (if you are on a Mac) It's fairly intuitive and very cost effective.

Chad, The transparencies are how I generally go about doing this. Possibly using an extracted surface would be another. Of course, using another application like C4D would be ideal but that is not going to get you there currently. You mentioned that having masks created for you by graphics people in the past has worked for you but that you are "not a Photoshop guy". I would propose this as a quick solution for you: I do this all the time and my colleagues laugh at me because "it's not the way you do things", however, it does work very well and you can do it immediately. Creating a mask is nothing more than drawing some relatively simple geometry. Of course you can do this in Illustator or similar programs very accurately, but then you need the program and you need to invest the time to learn to use it. We already have a program that does exactly that and you already know how to use it. Draw your masks in VW. It's extremely quick and you don't have to have any additional skill sets or applications. Assuming you are working with a rectangular screen (though it really doesn't matter) draw a rectangle in plan view the size of your finished screen and extrude it Apply the texture image you plan to use to the extrusion. Then start creating your mask however you would like to see it using simple lines or perhaps more accurately using polygons. Don't forget the duplicate array tool. Render this achieve your final look and then export as an image file using the "draw marquee" option. The cursor will snap to your end points. This image then becomes the basis for your new screen texture. It just takes a couple of minutes and frankly, I can do this way quicker than most graphics guys in their programs. I suggest either doing this in a separate drawing file or assign these objects to a specific class or layer so that you can quickly create additional masked images as necessary by simply changing the initial texture. Just a thought.

I was thinking about this and thought that the image prop solution would look a little more realistic if the prop texture was slightly transparent. Is there a way to apply a transparency to an image prop?

That is odd. I recall in the early days of Vision seeing a demo of a song by Evanesssence I believe that included gerbs. I never had cause to use them but assumed that was part of Vision's functionality.

I am not sure what you mean by "quadrants" beyond what Sam just mentioned.

Andy, I completely agree. Also, after 20 years or so in MiniCad and VW I don't think I ever realized I could name a RW light object. Thanks for that.

Andy, thank you for posting. The more people we can get on board with these concepts the better. As to the "channel" and "purpose" comment, much appreciated and I am aware of that when using instruments designed to work with Spotlight. I do that as well. What I am talking about is using lighting objects such as point sources (for ambient light) and more likely spotlight lighting objects. This avoids the need for focus points and for actually having to render a fixture. Mjm, I totally agree that Vision is not up to speed for photo-realistic rendering. Having the ability to use a streamlined version of Vision with a simple, on board console to effectively "light" a scene and then going back into renderworks to render it is what I was thinking. Also, to confuse the issue, it would be nice to be able to utilize Vision's superior atmospheric effects (light beams starting at the size of the fixture apperature and following the law of squares as opposed to the embarrasing volumetrics we have now) and still use renderworks. Since Vision uses OpenGL, that will probably never happen so I am holding out to see if the developers will allow us, even for an additional fee, to have similar control over the volumetrics in the current rendering engine that is already available in C4D. The point if all of this is that all this functionality already exists. We know how to draw in VW. Can we just have access to the control???? I would pay extra for that.

I am going to add a bit to my above post. The issue for me, and for many designers, including the OP Fabrice, is the project pipeline and how we work with our clients. In a nut shell, it works like this: 1.) Initial meetings with client, director, producer or whatever parties are required to get started on a project 2.) Initial design which can be presented as still images, walk throughs, videos, or even VR. In my case, these are almost always still images that are either sent out as multiple PDFs or perhaps strung together in a slide show. occasionally I may do a walk-through, but there is seldom time for that. These need to be high quality renders and, frankly, Renderworks is more than capable as it stands to do most of what we need. It does it slowly, but it certainly works with no need for outputting to another platform for texturing or post processing or anything else. My only real concern with Renderworks, which is beyond the scope of Fabrice's initial post is that the parent company does no allow access to suitable volumetric lighting effects even though the rendering engine is certainly capable of it. That is a serious point of contention for me. 3.) Major or minor adjustments are made to the design to accommodate the requests of client, director, producer, the budget or any other stimulus. This alone is reason enough to want to stay inside one application. If I need to make revisions, I need to make them with no concerns about what I then have to "re-do" in another application such as Cinema 4D. There is often no time for that. It is important to note that, at least in my case, items 1 through 3 often happen very quickly. I am currently on a project that I am designing (a televised awards show) for which I was only contacted two weeks ago and the event loads-in in four days from now. From the point I started conceptualizing the project to a first set of multiple renderings was two days. I did eight revisions yesterday, each with two final quality renders over the course of three hours. For me there just is no time to mess around with exporting into another program simply to have the full use of the functionality that is currently locked up in the VW rendering engine. In the past ten years I have no idea how many projects I have designed, but there has only been one that had significant enough lead time to involve other rendering options. 4.) Once the final design is approved, the drawings are then cleaned up for the fabrication shops, and the production staff/vendors. This is where VW really shines as the resulting plan views, sections, elevations and isometrics tend to look great. 5.) At that point, and only at that point, do we get into pre-visualization whether that is something I do or someone else, assuming the project calls for it. So herein lies the frustration with the Vision/VW relationship and is exactly what Fabrice is pointing to: The functionality for most of what is requested is currently available through Vision. For all of us, we need a simple way to add some lights, turn them on, do the various things that designers do with them, and then focus them (without going through the time consuming process of adding focus points) and WITHOUT having to address them, assign them to a universe, then fax through all of that and trouble shoot issues, so that we can present beautiful images that we can SELL to clients. Once the SELLING is done, then we can get into all the cool Vision functionality for pre-visualization but certainly NOT before. Having some simple method of getting at the core concepts of Vision to "set the scene" and then porting that back into VW would solve nearly all of the issues Fabrice is noting. We don't have to hang an entire lighting plot; we just need enough lights to sell the idea and that might be 20 or it might be 200. To add to what Fabrice has said, I need the volumetric qualities of OPEN GL Vision with the realistic textures and reflections of Renderworks as volumetric lighting effects are a big part of almost all of my projects and what we have now is laughable. I understand that the parent company needs to sell software. My frustration is that we are already spending a pretty hefty chunk of change on VW and most of us can design what we need to design within it's framework without the need to use another program. The functionality of Vision is already there, the rendering engine is already there. If we could just have access to what already exists, there would be a lot of users that would be very, very happy. To get through the first three steps of the process, the steps that actually sell a project, we need some limited access to Vision functionality. For a lot of users, that is the only amount of Vision functionality they would ever need. If we are going to do legitimate pre-vis, then we would certainly need to purchase Vision. (I was a very early adopter if Vision by the way) We also need a bit more control over light objects which the rendering engine clearly can do, it's just that VW users are not given access to that functionality. So that is my position in a verbose nutshell. One other side item to add and Fabrice touched on this as well: I often add standard light objects to illuminate parts of my models. I do this for a few reasons, including, not needing to see the source lighting fixture and finding it much quicker to focus, and often easier to adjust other parameters as well. What would be great is if there was some way to "name" those elements so you know which one is which in the Visualization Palette. Currently the 1.00.11.1.0 or whatever is just not helpful. Currently I just class the daylights (possible pun intended) out of all those items so I can turn things on and off, but the Vis Palette would be extremely useful. Oh, and a real projector...... (love the idea of a camera viewport built into it)

Any movement on this issue from The developers? Any improvement in 2018???

Fabrice, I absolutely agree with you and this is a drum I have been banging do the past seven years. Without going into a world of detail on each of your very valid points, I will say the following: it seems that utilizing Vision to accomplish much of this would be a viable way to go for VW developers. Vision renders in OpenGL in real time and allows for fixture focus, gobo focus color functions and shutter cuts with ease. It has been suggested that VW include a simple "console" function in spot light that allowed for pan/tilt, intensity, color, gobo, shutter control, etc. It should also include a "fan" feature for selected fixtures. It doesn't need to do anything more than that. To me, the question is how to take an image from Vision and render it in Renderworks. As to gobos, I spent a while creating a library of hard and soft edged patterns so I have quick access to a wide variety patterns. Creating new ones is pretty quick. Of course, having a focus feature would be much better. I would also also agree that a working projector would be a fantastic addition and has been suggested. Until then I have been muddling by with pattern projection to accomplish this. Not ideal but somewhat serviceable. I think it's reall a question of how much functionality the developers are willing to port from Cinema4D to VW. They, of course, would prefer for us all to purchase both VW and C4D. I understand that, but I already know my way around VW and it really does do pretty much everything I need it to do.We just need some better interface options and for VW to output my work in a more useful way. Dont get get me started on volumetric rendering.......

If you are doing that many, clearly the lamps are going to be fairly small and if render times are important, then I would use an image prop. I've done this a few times and it works. It's not nearly as elegant as some of the above suggestions but you can get the point across. Perhaps a little post work to tart it up. These are trade-offs, but that is what I would suggest.