Lightwright
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Posts posted by Lightwright
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What version of Vectorworks? I hope you immediately filed a bug report, including the .vwx file.
If you suspect it's a problem with Lightwright, file a bug report with the .vwx and .lw6 files at lightwright.com.
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Nay.
There are endless numbers of possible features now and in the future, some real and some advertising puffery. I read about the specs before I put a light on the plot, I don't need to fill up the OIP with possibly dozens or hundreds of manufacturer-specific items that are hard to categorize and which each manufacturer may describe differently or be unique to that light.
The LIR (and by extension the OIP) just needs things that the user wants to see on the plot or in Lightwright and/or needs to use in calculations or needs to edit to modify the behavior of a lighting device.
Just my .02, of course 🙂
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Mickey,
If you're opening old Vectorworks files, the address information may be in the "wrong" fields for use with current versions of Vectorworks. There's a page about Vectorworks and Addresses at lightwright.com via the Resources menu. Addresses were often put into the Dimmer field, when transitioning the file to Lightwright 6 you need to move them or use "Legacy" mode in Lightwright.
- John
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I don't know enough about schematic views, but if there is more than one lighting device that represents the same light, then there will be more than one row in Lightwright. I thought schematic views were for display purposes on the plot only. I've never tried using them, so I'm sorry to say I'm not much help.
If the schematic view is just a viewport, it shouldn't be sending duplicate info to Lightwright. It sounds like in creating the viewport somehow additional lighting devices were created. One thing you can try doing is select the worksheet rows in Lightwright one at a time and use the Edit/Select/Select in Vectorworks command, then click on Vectorworks and see what's selected. That might help you figure out where the duplicates are coming from.
Can someone with experience in schematic views help here?
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When I said "it only screws up if Data Exchange has been started", that really means "If you have ever connected the .vwx file to Lightwright or want to connect in the future." not "when you are currently connected to Lightwright." The problem is that the Vectorworks and Lightwright UIDs aren't being duplicated properly during any copy/mirror/duplicate operation in Vectorworks.
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You're right - Lightwright calculates circuit needs based on the dimmer assigned to each light. With today's proliferation of LEDs, dimmer doubling, and other things that make it all complicated, it is usually more complicated than what you're looking for. No doubt Vectorworks has a better way of doing what you need, though I don't know how it calculates the circuit totals without dimmer numbers.
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Lightwright can do it, under Reports, choose "Minimum qty of circuits needed in each Position". If you want to put it on the VW drawing, either send it to the clipboard or send it to the Report window and then copy that window's contents, then paste into a text object in Vectorworks.
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23 hours ago, Sam Jones said:
The important thing is not to try and share LW and XML files; information sharing should only occur through the checking out of VW layers.
This does mean rigorous adherence to project sharing rules is required. If it is just an ME and LD sharing plot, I think it would be better to do without project sharing, but if Lighting, rigging, audio, scenery, venue setup, and the TD are all running around the drawing project sharing is very alluring to me; keep LW and the XML files on local computers only.
HUGE CAVEAT: I've never done this.
When you've done this successfully (with a full production team), please let me know.
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And suppose there are lights on more than one layer, and you don't check out all of them?
Or another example - you do work in Lightwright, on your computer, so changes you made are in your copy of the .xml, but because Vectorworks isn't open it hasn't processed the .xml file and cleared it out, etc.. Meanwhile, someone else does what you suggest, and makes changes. Their changes are now in the .vwx file (assuming they clicked back on Vectorworks). So now you open the .vwx file (with project sharing or not), so the changes you made are read by Vectorworks, but because Vectorworks has already processed the other person's changes, you don't hear about any of those changes.
The more cases you start to consider, the worse it gets. You're welcome to try and make this work, but I can guarantee there WILL BE PROBLEMS. I've heard about them for years now, there are no workarounds.
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On 6/21/2018 at 2:21 PM, Sam Jones said:
I don't have a good way to test this, but it would seem to me that everyone could keep their own LW file on the local disc. All data would be shared via Vectorworks file. All the esoteric data that is only in the LW file, doesn't need to be shared, even between designer and electrician. As for others they won't have a LW file to worry about. I don't have the any opportunity to use project sharing, so, am I missing something?
That would work only if every time you changed anything in Vectorworks, it exported *all* data for *all* lights. That would make it glacial and be the equivalent of the old export-and-merge method. Data Exchange relies on their being only ONE .vwx file and ONE .lw6 file, which share data with each other. The .xml file is maintained for ONE user, with Vectorworks and Lightwright on the same computer. If someone else simply opens a remotely located .vwx or .lw6 file that has Data Exchange active, their copy of VW or LW would get the data out of the .xml file so it wouldn't be there for the intended user, resulting in chaotic data and nothing useful.
And Project Sharing cannot be used with Data Exchange. Ever.
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Lightwright's focus coordinates are text fields and in practical use rarely contain coordinates expressed as X/Y values. In most cases, the entry is something like "6L @ 4", which means 6' SL of center and 4' upstage of center. Other times, they can be something like "Standing on Sofa" or "Leaning on SL proscenium".
So while focus coordinates could possibly be brought from Vectorworks on a one-time basis into Lightwright in a future release, they would never be able to transfer from Lightwright back to Vectorworks.
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You also need VW2018 Service Pack 2, that's the one that opens up the universe, u_address, and dimmer fields so that they can be edited & shared with Lightwright. Repeating Kevin Linzey's advice, read the Lightwright 6 Addresses and Vectorworks document (it's in Lightwright's Help menu), it's critical.
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It's not helpful to share fixture modes, because Vectorworks and Lightwright use different databases for their fixture profile information, and the text used to describe the mode is different in each. Same problem between Lightwright and Eos - different profile databases. Lightwright doesn't deal with it at all, Eos handles it by showing you the Lightwright profile/mode and lets you then select the appropriate match from the Eos data. There's no similar feature to do that in Vectorworks as far as I know.
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Project sharing is NOT compatible with Data Exchange. It doesn't have anything to do with Vectorworks quitting or not...:(
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Lightwright Data Exchange with VW 2022
in Troubleshooting
Posted
This is a known bug in Vectoworks 2021. The problem is that new VW UIDs aren't getting made when you create duplicates of lights. That means that when the data goes to Lightwright, the copies are seen as the same lights as their originals. The hard part is that VW has not been able to reproduce and pin down this bug, so if you can tell the VW engineers (here, or ideally by filing a bug report) exactly what you were doing just before this behavior started, they could fix the problem at the root. In the meantime, use the current release of VW 2022, which includes code to generate new VW UIDS whenever you do a "complete export on exit", which fixes the problem until it happens again.