Edward Joseph

Hey Cory, Gaspar is totally right. I personally use a similar workflow where I keep lights and truss together as one esc and merge in the rest as other esc files. This allows me to tinker with the stage and scenery without affecting the lights. I've even seen some users export each truss to a different esc file, but that seemed a bit overkill in my experience. Also, the truss itself counts as geometry for the Vision exporter. To make life easier on you during changes, I'd recommend grouping objects that you DON'T want to come to Vision. Grouped objects or objects who's classes are hidden are not exported. You can't swap fixture types in Vision, but I would strongly recommend making the change in Spotlight anyway, as that's what you're actually going to have to show to your electricians anyway, and it keeps your paperwork in order. If you need to, you can use the "each truss w/ lights is an esc" method, that way if you need to refocus, you only have to do one stick of truss. Also, make sure you use the edit Vision data plugin from Spotlight>Viz>Edit Vision Data. All conventionals going to Vision should have gel and gobo changes made here. Hope that helps!

We could definitely discuss it and you're welcome. I'm not sure what the easier way would be just yet, I'd have to have a talk with the engineers about it. I'll let everyone know about it.

I can totally help with this! I just recently played around with a video demo that had 60-ish screens. Vision will replace each textured object you use the Vision screen plugin on with a screen. So I brought any texture in (it doesn't matter which kind of texture as long as it's an image texture - I use a grid or eggcrate for alignment purposes) then duplicated it for as many screens as I have, then apply each texture to an individual screen. Now the easy part - if you want ONE video to play over a surface, just throw the texture on to the whole surface, then use the Vision Video plugin on that. It will replace the texture with Video. Note: This will be a 1:1 swap, so a repeating (tiled) texture will repeat as a Video. Finally, as for your geometry, I personally would probably select it all and add solids, then convert to generic solids if the mesh didn't need to be too complex.

We are working on finding a way to get the blackmagic cards to work properly, they send the video stream in an encrypted format, unlike many others. While we don't have a hard list of capture cards that are working, I have had personal success with the cheap Avermedia cards. We are discussing a way to do large scale testing to whitelist some, hopefully that doesn't mean buying one of each, as there are hundreds of cap cards, my fingers hurt just thinking of installing all of those haha.

Whoa Brendan, that is SUPER weird. I'm going to have our fixture guy take a look. I have a feeling it has to do with the new lens illumination not keeping up with the head speed or some issue with the strange axis of movement with the cosmopix. Thanks for the video, that really helps clarify the issue.

Also, make sure you update to at least sp2, preferably sp3 for both Vision and Vectorworks. On top of a bunch of bug fixes (like some fixtures not auto-populating a list), there are some huge render improvements. More info can be found here:

Make sure you're setting a fixture mode for each fixture and you have some sort of 3d geometry in the scene. That's the only thing that could cause it in sp3, the runtimecache issue has been resolved.

We apologize for that, it must have been an oversight on our part (as well as a bit of trouble with the forum notifications). The crash you were referring to is fixed with SP3 on Windows. Multipart with an excess of parts could sometimes trigger a crash, the Cosmopix has 12 cells at RGBW, So 4 parts per cell. Give it a go in SP3, in addition to way better beam rendering, we've added support for lights with a ton of cells, animated haze, and a wealth of other improvements.

Hey Jake, sorry for the delay, this has been fixed in the latest service pack for Vision. You can find it here:

Vision SP3, which was just released today has Video fixes, including capture devices, as well as many other things: For those still on Vision 4 (as the screenshots above) please update to Vision 2017. Vision 4 will no longer be improved and updated. It has been made obsolete by Vision 2017. The main office will be testing hardware capture cards but I have gotten it working with a borrowed webcam for windows, and have gotten report that hippotizers work as well. Currently though, hardware capture devices are the way to go. Avermedia has a few from $50-100 USD that have worked in our builds just fine.

Unfortunately no, while you could do that in Vision 2.3, it hasn't been an option for a while. The funny thing is, this is the first I've heard anyone mention it. I can put in a word to the engineering dept in the form of a feature request though.

Great to hear that fixed it for you. Let us know if you run into more trouble.

Unfortunately there is much more that goes into making a fixture than building the geometry in Vectorworks. In the backend we also have to program the photometrics, bones (if it's a mover) and we build separate geometry specifically for Vision. This results in an extremely time-consuming process, which is why we have people who only build the fixtures all day. What I can do though is pester the person who builds them for vision, and get him to send you a reply.

Hi there! I'm Edward, one of the guys who work on Vision, and I'd be happy to help. When your fixture request was completed, you should have received VWX symbols once the request was complete. To update the list of available fixtures when setting a fixture mode, you just need to open Vision and run Help>Check for updates. This will populate the list with your new fixtures (be sure to have your dongle in when you run the updater). As for converting, unfortunately there is no way to convert a fixture to another inside Vision. You could delete it and add the fixture via the add instrument tool on the tollbar, but keep in mind; you'd have to reposition the fixture using the properties window of that fixture. I often find it's much easier to just swap in Vectorworks, and re-export. Hope that helps!

No problem, happy to help! I see what you mean, they are scaling a bit small compared to the VW icons. I can have a talk with the design team, maybe we should have a minimum icon resolution. I will forward your input on to them. If you have any other tech questions you are more than welcome to shoot an email over to tech@vectorworks.net.

I can help you out with this. First, currently the only way to select fixtures in Vision 2017 is through the scene graph, this actually helps quite a bit for performance, as making an object "clickable" adds another calculation to the rendering screen. As for moving an Item, only conventionals can be moved with the arrow keys, if you select a fixture by it's unit number in the scene graph, you can right-click (cmd+click/2 finger click on mac) anywhere in the scene to focus a light there, then tweak with the arrow keys, or just move it the whole way with arrow keys. You can't use the arrow keys with moving heads as they only respond to DMX. It would be like trying to grab the head of a VL4k and turning it in a direction, it would resist, and try to stay where the DMX told it to be. Software console: only conventionals make use of the software console. Personally, I think there could be a better name for it, the software console basically reproduces all of the physical options on a conventional, i.e. Gobo Index, Shutters, etc. Lastly, the Root menu is designed to collapse after you delete something, it prevents the user from accidentally deleting more than just the fixture they needed to. We understand it can be a process to re-add it in the right spot. This is being looked at though, perhaps we can find a better way of doing this. As for the menu bar, what sort of monitor are you running Vision on? Or rather, what resolution? The icon size should scale per your display. Hope that helps!

Greetings from the Las Vegas Vectorworks office!