Dealing with conventional units in Vision is cumbersome and time consuming, to say the least. Perhaps there are things I'm missing, but here are the troubles I have:
Using the software console to focus instruments is great!! However, some fixtures in the vision library are missing required parameters. (for example a 1k fresnel can spot/flood, but not a 650 fresnel). Also; If you have selected a range of instruments, changes in the software console do not change all selected instruments, only the first instrument in the list. I would expect at worst all fixtures would jump to the parameter position selected in the console, but at best all fixtures would respond to changes in the software console as a modification of whatever their existing state is. For example I could grad 4 fresnels, one spot one flood and two mid range, and drag the spot flood control in the software console to flood out all units or spot down all units proportionally with their existing state as the start point for the modification.
Similarly, it's very tedious to focus conventional instruments. Yes "focus instruments here" command is useful in getting individual units close, but the vast majority of conventional instruments are utilized as systems in our industry. Both Vectorworks and Vision are surprisingly ill equipped to deal with this. For example if I have a system of 20 lights, it's most likely that I've laid them out such that they should all be tilted at 35º and panned 15º (or whatever suits the design). To do this in Vectorworks and export to vision I need to double the work by making a FP for every single unit and individually assign those units to those FP. In vision, I can select a range of units and choose the "focus instruments here" command, but what I actually want is to grab all units and tilt them up in unison, pan them to the left in unison, etc. Navigating through the units to manually use arrow keys to focus the units is also tedious, as Vision does not recognize repeating keys; requiring me to mash the up and left arrow keys 50 times each FOR EACH UNIT to get to my desired goal.
Complicating all of this, if I take the time to focus my units manually and discover a change that needs to be made in Vectorworks, I'll lose all those settings when I re-export from Vectorworks. Yes I could save the scene, separate our layers, export just the changes from VWX and import just those changes to Vision, but that is extraordinarily tedious to manage on a user basis. The "send to vision" command is great in VWX; we need some way to either make that communication bi directional or to store these manual changes and re-apply them to a new export.
Ladies; Gentleman....there's got to be a better way. What am I missing?
And if I'm not missing something here....PLEASE let's take this thread as a feature request. We've got to be able to let the computers computer here, as the current situation is massively labor intensive to the point that it's just not worth it for me to do it myself unless it's a labor of love. I certainly can't charge a client for the hours of time it would take to make renderings in this manner.
Some suggestions:
Pan+Tilt could be added to software console
Software console could affect all selected lights simultaneously
Vision could accept repeating keys for focus changes
Duplicate unit profiles could be made that give P+T+Electrician human console parameters, which would allow me to patch some dummy channels to control these items in the console and thus preserve focus changes through drawing changes, since the data is being stored in the lighting console and sent to vision via dmx.
Bi-directional communication between VWX+ESP to allow manual changes to be preserved, streamlining the creative process and preventing duplicate work. OR: Manual focus data stored so it can be re-applied to new exports.
How else can this problem be solved? Has it been solved somewhere and I'm just missing it?
Thanks
Late 2015 iMac
Quad Core i7 4Ghz
AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4GB
32 GB Ram
MacOS Mojave
VWX+Vision 2019 with all current updates as of posting.