bbudzon

Our DMX Transforms only support a single axis of rotation. However, PSN should support rotation on all axes simultaneously. The order that each axis rotation is applied for a PSN object is based on the PSN Rotation Order.

It is possible to perform video playback without DMX. We support both video files on disk and NDI Streams coming from a media server. Video files on disk loop indefinitely without any control over playback. This is intended for simple files that you can loop and not care about what timestamp the video is at. If you need control over playback, I suggest you use a media server and NDI. One advantage of video files on disk is that they work with offline rendered movies. With NDI, you will have to do a screen capture. In either case, you may find a screen capture to be easier / more intuitive depending upon your familiarity with rendering movies offline in VW. Camera movements in VW can be controlled via path animations. These can work with screen captures in real time or in an offline rendered movie. Showcase supports these path animations. And so, you can get camera movements while your video is playing back. The only thing you will not be able to do is simple adjustments to lighting. This is only possible with DMX currently. I hope this helps! There are a lot of resources out there for doing things like video playback in Showcase. If you have trouble finding them, I'm sure we can get you pointed in the right direction.

What version of Vision are you running? We have had quite a few fixes related to sACN lately. And, we have more on the way in Update 3. But, knowing what version you are using will help us better understand what problems you may be running into. FWIW, I recommend you run the latest version of Vision for obvious reason; which the most recent version is 2025 Update 2.

I looked in the code and we indeed explicitly disable things like Full Screen and Absolute Camera values. I think disabling Full Screen is most understandable. Most people would be surprised if opening a file forced their application into full screen mode because that was the state it was saved in. Especially when you consider that these files can be emailed to other people. For similar reasons, we explicitly disable Absolute Camera at file load time as it can cause a lot of confusion if you don't realize that the Absolute Camera is enabled. We do load the universe and channel for ease of use. We simply felt, at the time and based on user feedback, that is was best to require the user to explicitly enabled certain features such as Absolute Camera and Full Screen. I hope this at least provides an explanation to the behavior you are seeing. If you'd like to see this behavior changed, it is something that we can bring up in our meetings to discuss.

I'll have to check the code, but I think we intentionally do not store the Absolute Camera checkbox and only store its Universe and Channel. This was because some people were opening their file, forgetting that Absolute Camera checkbox was checked, and they complained that they navigation tools with the mouse were not working. It is odd that your DMX transform settings for objects aren't saving though. I don't ever remember there being a reason we wouldn't want to do that. I'll see if I can reproduce the issue and, if I can, open a bug report internally. Thank you for catching this! And, I'll also try to take a look at the code when I have some time to give you an update on the Absolute Camera checkbox.

There are a lot of MA users on our forums, I believe. Hopefully, someone can chime in and maybe help you figure this issue out!

Cameras have two forms of control. One is your basic settings like Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, FOV, etc. I don't think this is what you are asking about. The second is camera position and orientation via DMX. I think this is what you'd like more information on. My suggestion is that you ignore the relative cameras. I never liked how they worked, it is hard to explain, and they just take a lot of work to understand. They were kept for legacy reasons. Although you might argue they are better at certain things, these are advanced topics that you should only tackle once the other DMX camera controls are better understood. I would suggest you learn and use the absolute DMX camera. There is some documentation here which also shows how the profile needs to be setup on the console. Each feature is 24bits (ie; 3 channels, one for coarse, one for fine, and one for ultra fine control). https://app-help.vectorworks.net/2023/Vision/2023_Vision/Vision/DMX_control_of_the_Absolute_camera.htm The absolute camera is quite straight forward in my opinion. Once it is patched, it takes over all camera controls in Vision (ie; you can no longer use navigation tools). It allows the camera to move in a bounding cube that is +/- 1000 meters in any direction. So, a DMX value of 0% on the X axis will place the camera at -1000m X, a DMX value of 50% on the X axis will place the camera at the X origin, and a value of 100% on the X axis will place the camera at +1000m X. You can combine X, Y, and Z movement to get the camera positioned where ever you like. DMX values of 50% for X, Y, and Z position will place the camera at the origin, which should be your starting point. Because this is all handled via DMX, you can save and recall cues on your console to "jump" to different positions in the scene. This camera mode also allows the camera to pan/tilt from -720 to +720 degrees via DMX, and you can even control FOV through DMX with this mode. I hope this helps!

We have seen inconsistencies in the ability to load crops. This is something we need to investigate to try to figure out what is going on. It's, at least in part, due to the conversion of pixels into percentages which is necessary to preserve the crop position when changing an NDI stream between high and low bandwidths. It seems that sometimes we lose "precision" in the percentage. And so, when you open the file, we're looking for a crop that is say 95.37% for a given corner but we can only find a crop whose corner is at 95.36%. I'm not sure if this is possible for you or not, but one workaround is to do this cropping on the media server side. You can then send out multiple NDI streams such that no cropping is required in Vision. Regarding your second point, it's hard to say if this will work or not... but keep your eye out for Vision 2025 Update 2 😉 There were a lot of problems that we found with similar functionality in Showcase in 2025U0/U1. And, when we fixed these in Showcase, we made sure to address these issues in Vision as well. So, there are at least some fixes for Vision's video dialogs that are going into 2025 Update 2. I do think one fix missed the Update 2 window and got pushed back to Update 3. But, I hope the Update 2 fixes resolve your issues and if not please let us know! That will keep us informed and kick off further investigations. Thanks again!!

These are good pieces of feedback we have not gotten before! You aren't missing anything, unfortunately. Giving custom names to these video sources is particularly interesting and I'm surprised we hadn't thought of it! I can also see how dealing with percentages vs pixels might be easier. I think the reason we stuck with pixels in that portion of the dialog is so that you can get very precise crops (ie; pixel perfect) if need be. There's a sort of renewed energy within the company surrounding pre-visualization at Vectorworks because of Showcase shipping in 2025. So, now is a great time for providing feedback! Thank you!!

I'm glad you were able to get it to work! And, I know the "transition" from Vision into Showcase can be a little confusing as Vision was always in inches and Y was up. We hope that Showcase being in VW will sort of "set the record straight" and be less confusing in the long run to our users.

That is definitely odd! Movement is generally easier to work with when compared to rotation as rotation only supports one axis at a time. And, you are clearly getting DMX into Showcase and have things patched correctly if the Z and X axes are working as expected. May I ask what object you have applied this record to? And, can I also have you confirm that you do indeed have a non-zero value in the Delta Y field of the record?

Thank you for digging down into this! In regards to opening a bug, if you have access to JIRA then you can open one there. I think that might only be available to beta users though. Otherwise, I would advise contacting tech support. They should be able collect additional information, make sure the issue is reproducible on our machines, and open a ticket for engineering to take a look! There are two things that stick out to me. First is that only one is showing lit fog. Second is that the lens glow on the right most device appears to be incorrect. For the first issue, there is a known problem with shadows and lit fog. I would highly recommend turning shadows off everywhere for showcase until we can get that issue resolved. There may not be much you can do about the second issue. If you mention this while you are talking with tech support, they can collect your files and kick off investigations. Real quick, regarding GDTF vs Fixture Mode, Showcase will use whatever is present. So, if only GDTF Fixture Mode is assigned, it will use that. If only Fixture Mode is assigned, it will use VW's native content. If both are assign, Showcase will prefer VW's native content (ie; Fixture Mode). I hope this provides some clarification as to how these dropdowns interact with Showcase!

Okay. So, there is a way to do this even though we no longer provide links to older versions. You should be able to do this via the Install Manager, but there is a bug in it that we are working to resolve. What you need to do instead is download the latest installer: https://release.vectorworks.net/latest/Vision/2025-NNA-eng-mac https://release.vectorworks.net/latest/Vision/2025-NNA-eng-win From here, you can actually select Vision 2025 Update 0. I suggest you install this into a new folder and not on top of the existing install. I hope this helps!! PickVersion.mp4

I was hoping you might say this 😅 Again, my apologies for not providing you any updates as we progressed in our investigations. This is still pretty hot off the press. Try falling back to Vision 2025 Update 0. You are currently on Update 1 and we discovered known issues with 2025 Update 1 specifically.

My apologies. I wasn't directly investigating this issue, and so I didn't think to follow up. But, I brought your post up to the team and this kicked off a large investigation of what was going on. We believe we've identified some issues with our installers and are hoping to address these soon. Perhaps, you could answer one question for me that may help narrow things down. What version of Vision are you running?