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bbudzon

Vectorworks, Inc Employee
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Everything posted by bbudzon

  1. Yup, completely agree! I know there has been a lot of discussion internally about the way patching is handled and we are looking to address those concerns as soon as possible!
  2. We do have presets for the Vision "ROOT" settings. We refer to them as Document Settings now per the VW nomenclature. I have heard some interesting suggestions about making it easier to save and recall these presets though! If you wanted to elaborate at all, that would be great!
  3. Yea, we definitely need to get this working! We were hoping to eventually get more things like RGBW and whatnot in there as well and that only furthers the need for a pulldown!
  4. This is possible in the current release. You can adjust the Color Temperature and Candella of the fixture, which I'm sure you are familiar with. There is also a Vision specific setting called Beam Multiplier. This Beam Multiplier only effects the beam of the light and not the surface. Color Temperate and Candella effect both the beam and the surface. Let me know if you have any other questions.
  5. Do you have some examples of when this does and does not work for you?
  6. This is a complaint we've been hearing more and more. The way I would handle this is by adjusting code in the ESC/MVR Exporter to allow for different addressing schemes, so to speak. Great suggestion!
  7. There are workarounds to do this currently, but streamlining the workflow is ideal! One thing that is really cool is leveraging face culling.You have to have a proper cube with proper normals and winding order for this to work. Essentially, you can only ever see 3 faces of a cube at any given time. Normally, when face culling is on and working properly, we render the front 3 faces but not the back 3. This is done for performance reasons. What you can do that is clever though is flip the normals of the cube so that the back 3 faces are rendered instead of the front 3. What this means is that as you rotate around the cube, walls/floors/ceilings will disappear dynamically and on-the-fly! If you'd like to know more about this we can talk more directly as no code changes are needed to make this happen! The more realistic workflow is supporting a ceiling object with wall and slab objects alike. These can't leverage the face culling trick and will be less performance friendly as a result of the additional polygons. Either way, the current workflow unfortunately involves putting the ceiling inside a layer and then toggling the visibility of that layer. There's no rhyme or reason you can't do this for MeshShapes we just never got the request! This shouldn't take much time to implement on the coding side of things, as far as I can tell.
  8. @Brickyoyo Are you able to verify this bug with other fixture make/models? Can you please upload your VWX? What version of VW and Vision are you running (include Service Pack details in the version)? Thanks! Brandon
  9. I'm just a lowly Vision software engineer so I may need @BrandonSPP or another industry/VW expert to chime in/back me up here 😛 That being said, I can try to help with the capture device stuff as much as I can. Use the "Select Video Source" dialog in VW to assign video files to screens for Vision. If you wish to use a capture card for live input in Vision, you can assign a name/number to designate a unique video source from VW. Once in Vision (assuming we've properly detected your capture card), you will be prompted to select a live video source for the "live input texture" you assigned on the VW side. These sources can be cropped inside of Vision if you so choose. Please refer to this tech bulletin as it has the most amount of detail in it: No you do not. Screens playback cannot currently be controlled from within Vision. If you are using a capture card with Vision, please use the output device for media playback control. I'm not quite sure how to do this on the VW side of things as I primarily work on developing the Vision product line. I'll work on getting someone internally to work on drafting a response to this part or to reach out to you directly.
  10. All really good info! It's hard to say what's going on here though... 😞 Why don't we try to work together on getting a list of hardware with known issues. I'll pass this along to upper management so they can look into purchasing this equipment for internal testing. On another note, do you guys have any additional hardware you may be able to test with? Even if it is just a web cam or something like that?? Truly, any UVC device should do for testing. I just want to confirm that this problem you are experiencing is specific to the hardware.
  11. I did not know about Color Temperature crashing! We'll investigate that and hopefully have it fixed soon. In theory, it should never be needed but it is there for precisely this reason! Very sorry, again, and we'll look into getting the crash resolved. On a different note, I looked at a "James Thomas 8-light Molefay" and it's color temperature is set to 3000K. On the other hand, a "Generic Par 64" has a color temperature of 3200K. I'll have to pull @Mark Eli in on this one as he would be the one to correct the default color temperature for these fixtures. Edit: Do these values line up with what you are seeing in the Properties Palette for the fixtures you are using? I know that changing the value in the Properties Palette crashes Vision, but I'd just like to know what you are seeing in the Properties Window for the color temperature of your molefay and your par64.
  12. I'm sorry @nakedeye, MANet and HoggNet are only supported on PC at this moment. HoggNet we may be able to get working on MAC OS, but MANet is restricted to PC by GrandMA themselves.
  13. This bug should be resolved with Vision 2019 SP2. The issue was that we thought the file was temporary and so we cleaned it up when we shouldn't have. If you are running SP2 and still experiencing this issue, please provide the files you are working with a steps to reproduce the issue, if at all possible. This will help us resolve the issue as quickly as we can.
  14. I believe this is a bug that I've already fixed for SP3. Keep an eye out 😉
  15. Hello @zeroInf! I'll do my best to answer your questions. The lens is sticking out of the fixture a little bit for historical reasons. Vision has never modeled fixtures "hollow" with a light inside. They've always been "solid" with a lens "where light should come out". Due to the way this is calculated, sometimes this results in the lens floating a little bit. In our experience, this usually goes unnoticed, but I will definitely pass this information along to the higher ups so they are more aware of the issue. LJ nailed the "Enabled Shadows" option. This will decrease performance but allow shadows to be cast and for light to "hit" a wall. I'd have to check with our content team to see why this fixture wasn't provided a "lightmap" (which is the way in which we "fuzz" surface lights to be more wash-like and less spot-like). LJ also nailed the bloom stuff. I'd actually recommend using pretty low settings here. Sometimes I'll use 1/1/1 for the three values. I usually end up bumping up the Bloom Lens Strength (to say, 5 or 10, maybe more based on taste) and lowering the Bloom Strength (to say, 0.5 or 0.1 even, again to taste). If you don't like this feature at all you can set Bloom Strength to 0 and it will disable it (in theory you'll get slightly better performance as well). The software console you're referring to in Vision was intended to simulate a stage hand. Lights that do not have pan/tilt dmx parameters must still be able to be focused in Vision. This is what the built-in software console is for. If you need to focus movers, please use one of the supported DMX Providers such as sACN or Artnet. Point and line tools are pretty worthless as they represent 1D and 2D geometry. Vision (and most previsualizers) only care about 3D geometry. The workflow that is recommended here at VW is to use VW to do your modeling and Vision to do your previsualization. LJ also nailed the XForm's setting 😉 And while I will pass along the information about controlling smoke machines and multiple cameras, I can already help you with the toolbar size! If you right click the toolbar, you'll get a context menu where you can set whether or not you want tool text beside/below the tool or not shown at all. You can also pick whether or not you want gray scale tool icons. Lastly and arguably most importantly, you can select the tool icon size from this context menu! Hope that helps!
  16. Thank you very much! I know this doesn't really help the situation, but I wanted you to know that the software is not limiting things to the best of my knowledge. Here is my 2015 MBP webcam resolution in Vision and in Quicktime; both are 720p. That being said, I'm concerned that maybe your hardware is hitting an edge case that we didn't account for. I'd like to investigate this further as it is unexpected behavior. I'll talk with upper management about obtaining one of these "Ezcap 265/C" devices for internal testing.
  17. 1. Ahhh, hahahaha. That is pretty clever! There is no other way to tell unless you have access to the code. I just never thought of checking the resolution in the crop dialog before! 2. How are you opening your webcam/capturecard in QuickTime? I wanted to try this out on my end as well and am not finding very good information online.
  18. Two quick questions: 1. Where are you locating the texture resolution in Vision? I just wanted to show you how things look on my end so you can see that it is not limited by the software. 2. Can you confirm that this stream can go above 640x480 in another application such as Skype?
  19. @thelightingguy I'm not sure if you were working with our tech support already or not, but I did hear about a customer who was having this issue (it just may have been you! hahaah). I believe they worked around the issue by switching DMX Providers?? (I have no idea why this would ever fix it, but it did seem to work around the issue for the time being.) One piece of information that I didn't receive was that it seems you are able to reproduce this in Vision 2019 SP1 but not in Vision 2019 SP0? Is that true? If so, it drastically helps us narrow down where the problem may be. FWIW, as well, I would recommend updating to Vision 2019 SP2 as it fixed a performance issue with SP1 involving multiple selections.
  20. @Gaspar Potocnik I'm glad you were able to successfully get live input into Vision! About the 640x480 thing; you will need to make sure the device outputting content is configured for 1080p as well as the device inputting content. As far as I know, we don't limit the resolution of live video content. The webcam on my MBP streams 720p content into Vision without issue (720p=1280x720, which is a higher resolution than 640x480). So, it would seem there is no limit on this content in Vision or the capture library we are using. That being said, and this may sound weird but I'm promise I'm not trying to be rude!, perhaps we should figure out if 1080p content is actually needed. Or from another point of view, what would be the benefit of feeding HD content into Vision versus lower definition content? Think of it this way, feeding 4K content into a 1080p television does no good. It will simply spit out a 1080p image and the human eye will be able to tell no difference. Bringing this into the Vision world, let's say you have a 1080p monitor. This means you have 1920x1080 physical pixels on your monitor. Odds are, that, the television is not taking up half (or even a quarter) of your Vision Render Viewport on your monitor. If I had to guess at an average case scnario, I would say televisions usually make up ~10% of the pixels that are rendered. What this means is that your television in Vision is likely using less than ~320x200 pixels in the render viewport. This is where feeding 1080p content does not increase quality but decreases performance (even if only slightly). phew 😛 So, while it may seem like feeding 1080p/4K content into Vision would result in a higher quality, more times than not it won't. I think 640x480 is a sweet spot for quality/performance, but to be completely honest you could probably even go lower (320x240 would probably still look pretty darn good and obviously takes a quarter the amount of time to process). Hopefully that answers all of your questions and hopefully it is more clear why it may not be the worst thing in the world if you're getting non-1080p content.
  21. @DBLD I spent a decent amount of time in the 2018 release getting the shortcuts and mouse movements to line up. For example, spacebar boomerang-activates the pan tool in VW and Vision. Middle click also activates the orbit tool in both VW and Vision. I believe we are both using the same key for toggle multiple viewports as well (even though Vision can only do 1 or 4 currently). Obviously things like Undo/Redo/Cut/Copy/Paste should be the same in both programs as well. If there are any shortcuts in particular you find are inconsistent, please open a JIRA ticket and we will work on getting those issues resolved!
  22. Just wanted to follow up on this old thread, but this issue should be resolved in 2019 SP2.
  23. Unfortuntely, @mjm had it right. There is no current way to do this in Vision and the recommend way would be to go back to the VW document and update the fixture mode there. That being said, this seems like a pretty severe workflow deficit that has gone unnoticed. I will pass this up the chain and see what we can do about implementing something that will allow you to change fixtures with multiple selection in Vision directly. In the meantime, please do your best to set the fixture mode properly in VW so the export to Vision is as complete as possible.
  24. Unfortunately, I can't commit to saying that any fixes will be shipped for SP3. I also cannot provide a date that SP3 will be shipped. This is honestly for the greater good though! We don't want to tell you something will be fixed if we haven't put it through proper testing yet! And similarly, we don't want to tell you that the software will ship on a specific day as you never know what may crop up! I'd much prefer to delay the release by a day if it means getting a quality release out to our customers 😉 I hope you understand why we like to remain flexible like this for our customers. I also hope it won't be too long before SP3 will be ready and that we can answer any other questions you have in the meantime!
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