kmoore1
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Posts posted by kmoore1
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quote:Originally posted by pscbimmer:Where do you edit the symbol definition?
Gareth's suggestion for editing an instance of s symbol is correct, but you will most likely not have any actual symbol instances. You will instead have lighting devices. In this case you'll need to edit the symbol definition through the resources palette, or place an instance of the symbol and use the editing procedure previously mentioned.
To edit the symbol from the resources palette just select the symbol and press the edit button in the resource palette. You'll need to make sure you have your current document selected in the resources palette and not one of the library files. If you want to update the master library file you'll need to browse to and open this file before editing the resource. In other words you can only edit resources for files that you have open but you can import resources from any file on the disk.
After pressing "Edit" A dialog comes up asking if you wish to edit the 2-d, 3-d, or insertion options. Choose the option for 2-D. Change the lineweights etc of the symbol definition. After exiting the symbol def it will upate all current instances of the symbol with the new attributes.
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quote:Originally posted by pscbimmer:Is there any way to put one light device a certain distance from the other by typing the exact distance in.
If you turn off the vectorworks preference for offset duplicates this becomes extremely easy. Select a fixture. Hit Ctrl-D do duplicate in place. hit Ctrl-M to move the fixture. Type in your x and y offsets. Voila.
You can do the same thing through the object info palette by looking at the x and y coordinates of a lighting fixture and entering similar coordinates for your other fixture.
i.e. I have a unit at (15'8", 7'11.5") and I want another fixture 8' to the left of this one on the same pipe. I'll insert the other instrument somewhere kind of close and then go to the Object info palette and type in (15'8" - 8') for the X Coordinate and 7'11.5" for the Y coordinate. Vectorworks will do the math for you in any of the numeric fields. You can use this trick to move an instrument a fixed distance. Select the X coordinate field and type in + 3' to move the instrument 3 feet to the right.
HTH
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quote:Originally posted by pscbimmer:Is there any way to change the lineweight of instruments.
Both the lighting instruments and the lighting positions are based on sybmols. The symbol defines the look of the object and the custom object provides the smart container around it. Just edit the symbol definition for your lighting instrument or lighting position and the changes will apply to all instances of the item.
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quote:Originally posted by E&S - Shaun:Hi,Here is my issue. I want to be able to write a script that will perform a custom selection of lighting instruments by circuit number. (of course) locked. Can someone please tell me the secret to selection of a lighting instrument?Thanks in advance
Shaun, The VectorScript call ForEachObject allows you to specify a criteria and call a procedure to operate on all found items. You're looking for items with the "Lighting Device" record attached whose "Circuit Number" field has a particular value.i.e.
ForEachObject(<YourProcHere>, ((R IN 'Lighting Device') & ('Lighting Device'.'Circuit Number' = UserCircNum)));
I probably mismatched some parenthesis above but you should be able to get gist of whats going on. This tests to see if the Lighting Device record is attached and if so it checks to see if the circuit number field matches the value the user has entered previously.
HTH
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quote:Originally posted by jeff:I am trying to create a backdrop from a jpeg file. I had understood that one imported it as a texture. That doesn't seem to be working for me. Please provide step-by-step instructions for doing this. Many thanks.
Check out the How-To Document at:http://www.nemetschek.net/support/technotes/rw_howto_winter/index.html
This goes into details on creating a texture decal to apply to objects. In your case you'll want to create a large wall or extruded rectangle at the back of the scene to act as the drop.
HTH
[ 06-28-2002: Message edited by: kmoore1 ]
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quote:Originally posted by daisymurray:I use Filemaker to 'massage' and distribute lighting info on a Mac. Am interested in updating SL drawing from filemaker data. anyone had any luck? What format is SL instrument data exported?Have previously used SYLK format to export database to filemaker with success but the return journey is compromised.
Just export a plain vanilla Tab delimited text file. Have filemaker place the field names as the first exported record to make life easier in matching up field names.
Most of the info in appendix D of the manual will apply to your round trip to filemaker as well.
There is one error in this appendix. On page d-67 the screen shot shows the import first record box as being being selected and the instructions make mention of making sure this is selected. If the first row of data coming from filemaker has your column/field headings then make sure to DESELECT this field so that spotlight does not try to import them.
HTH
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quote:Originally posted by michaelk:Has anyone found a way to have VectorWorks Spotlight count and/or keep track of ETC dimmer doubler two-fers? I can't think of a way to have an accessory that belongs to two different instruments.
Try using the ganging tool / two-fer object. You'll most likely want to tell it to two-fer by circuit as that should be the common element in the system. The lighting position's summary information will then tell you how many "two-fers" are necessary for a position. You can use VectorWorks Create Report command to do general show wide reporting of these as well.
The two-fer object has a field that allows you to override the default label container for a field. You can use this to make it show your own dimmer doubler symbol by typing the name into this field.
You could also create a new label legend for doubled instruments and assign the dimmer doubler symbol as the container for the appropriate label.Just add the doubler symbol to the containers symbol folder and it will appear in the list in the label legend manager.
HTH
[ 06-20-2002: Message edited by: kmoore1 ]
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quote:Originally posted by lalcaraz:KevinBut the real question is, why is 1 position on the plot notoriously renumbering itself when autonumber is Off?
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbably, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes ;-)
If the instruments are renumbering themselves then there is still a position with a position name that matches theirs that has the auto-numbering turned on. Double check to make sure the instruments are truely assigned to the position you think they are.
One way to cheat if you can't find the offending lighting position is to select the instruments and change the position name slightly. If it isn't an exact match with the actual lighting position's name it won't find it. So 1st_Electric can become 1st__Electric and the auto-numbering will stop.
HTH
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quote:Originally posted by lalcaraz:She has turned off Auto Renumber but the Twin Spins and all units on the Beam 3 position continue to renumber themselves, causing her an extra 1/2 hour of work everytime she exports back to Lightwright
Accessories automatically get the unit number of the instrument they are attached to. The intention was that when you change the unit number for an instrument the accessory automagically changes as well. Unfortunately it isn't being really smart about the unit number and just overwrites the whole thing. So if the unit number was 1 for the fixture and you painstakingly went into the accessory and changed the unit number to 1a for the attached accessory and the unit changes to 2 it overwrites the 1a with a 2. I'm assuming your trying to get the aforementioned behaviour, or am I misreading your post?
Regardless, the only way I was able to make the accessory not get the instrument's unit number was to break the association between the two (spotlight can be awfully tenacious)
To Do this, Select the accessory, or all of the accessories, you want to "fix". Go to the Object Info Palette Scroll all the way to the very bottom of the parameter list. The last item in the list is the UID. This is the magic ID number that SpotLight uses to keep track of which accessory is attached to which fixture, where data needs to go when going to and coming from lightwright, which fixutres are multicircuit and who their neighbors are, etc. In general it is a not a good idea to mess with this field as it will break things. In this case things are already broken so we don't have to worry about that. ;-)
Select the UID field and clear it out completely. (this is probably best acheived by clicking in the "Lightwright ID" field and then tabbing into the UID field" and hitting backspace) SpotLight will Immediately pick new UIDs for the selected items so don't be surprised when the field fills itself back out again. This should break the association between the instrument and the accessory. Now the two will behave completely independantly. This also means that moving and or rotating the lighting instrument will no longer move and rotate the accessory.
HTH
[ 06-18-2002: Message edited by: kmoore1 ]
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quote:Originally posted by Boulmetis:When i move a multi cir unit and then use undo to move it back, the multi parts get disjounted and will not restore back.
This is a problem we're working on. In the meantime you can temporarily change the device type of the errant fixture to "accessory" and move it into the correct place. Change the device type back to instrument and it will once again move with the rest of the instruments.
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quote:Originally posted by Anita:I have applied six drapes of different lengths to a stage, but when I click on the flyover tool, four of them disappear, and two remain. They are invisible until I return to top/plan mode. As far as I can see, I have given them all the same class and attributes. Any ideas? Could it be the fullness or the height being relative to the different lengths?
There is currently a bug with the curtain object that causes it to fail to draw the 3-d component of the curtain when the curtain length exceeds some large multiple of the fullness and the 3-d conversion resolution.
You can just take your long curtain runs that are failing in 3-d and draw them as separate shorter curtain segments to work around this problem.
Changing the Resolution parameter on the Object info palette for the curtain to a lower number may also help to make the curtain draw in 3-d.
[ 06-11-2002: Message edited by: kmoore1 ]
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quote:Originally posted by lalcaraz:KevinThanks for the info. I hope you can resolve it.Why would this be happening on the same machine when importing/exporting from Lightwright to Vectorworks?
Because they are both cross-platform apps and are both performing some sort of character mapping when writing and reading info. Someone isn't doing the right thing and that's causing the problem. Most likely we're doing something wrong in our mapping because most of Vectorworks assumes a "macintosh" baseline.
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quote:Originally posted by lalcaraz:KevinI spoke with a friend who uses Spotlight on a network with an Equal amount of PC's and Mac's and he say's that the exact same thing happens to the Degree Symbol when transferring from Mac to PC or vise versa. Thus it is not just a LW/VW thing.Lonnie
All the standard text characters like letters, numbers, etc are assigned an ascii value which is what the computer actually stores. For the first 128 ASCII characters both mac and windows use the same codes for the same letters. Everything works great. Unfortunately there is an extended ASCII Character set that covers another 128 characters. Most of the special symbols and old ascii line art stuff falls in this range. Of course our good friends Bill and Steve decided that the PC and Mac should use different ascii values for different characters in this extended set. Because of this you have to know the originating platform of the file and do a character mapping to translate the character code appropriately for your platform. If the application doesn't know the originating platform of the file it will incorrectly map the characters and choose the wrong character.
This is what is causing these headaches. Because we have a cross platform product we have to do character mapping between platforms in order to handle these characters. This mapping code seems to be breaking down somewhere and either isn't mapping characters correctly or more likely is assumining the wrong originating platform.
I'll keep you posted about my findings.
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quote:Originally posted by lalcaraz:In LW, the degree symbol is fine, and in the expoted "text" file, the degree symbol is fine but when that text file goes into VW, it changes it to a box.Any fix for this?Lonnie
One quick way to prevent this it to not pass the symbol name field back and forth to Lightwright. This poses problems if you're changing fixture types in Lightwright though. I'll look into this and see if I can duplicate the problem on this end.
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quote:Originally posted by bhorowitz:Mine will display channel or dimmer, but when I select circuit, it doesn't even display the circle container I specify. It does, however, then fail to display circuit where I have it specced on the label legend manager, as it should. It seems only to happen in versions 9.5 and newer.
I have been able to duplicate this problem here and am looking into it. I don't have any tips for you at this point for a work around. I'm fairly mystified as to why this isn't working in this particular mode. I'll keep you posted if I make any headway.
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quote:Originally posted by Swift:I have a problem importing instrument data back into SL 9.5.1. ....and no matter which group of data I use I get a Vectorscript error at 55 of 110 instruments.Any ideas how to fix this. It is one of the more appealling aspects of Spotlight and I would like it to work
Can you please e-mail me your data file from Excel, and the SpotLight drawing. There is probably something slightly off in the data, like an empty field or missing line return that is causing the problem.
kmoore@nemetschek.net
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quote:Originally posted by lalcaraz:I have been having problems with certain symbols combing into a Multicircuit Unit and I think I figured it out
Lonnie,The presence or absence of the Light Info record shouldn't have any bearing on an instrument's convertability. Currently the Convert To multicircuit command requires that the selected items be instruments and not symbols. You have to first convert the symbols to instruments and can then convert the instruments to a multicircuit instrument. (this is on the list to be fixed) By default the instrument version of the symbol wouldn't have a light info record attached to the outside and would convert correctly. If I select a symbol and try to convert it I'm getting an error message telling me that symbols cannot be converted directly to multicircuit units.
Perhaps this is what you're seeing?
HTH
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quote:Originally posted by lalcaraz:I AM LOSING MY PREFERENCES EVERYTIME I CLOSE AND RE-OPEN VECTORWORKS
Lonnie,Is it loosing serial numbers and prefs or just preferences like use sound etc?
What OS? If NT or 2k could it be possible that the user doesn't have enough permissions for VectorWorks to write the preference information out to the registry. Preference information is stored at the user account level so if one user logs in sets everything up and then logs out. If another user logs in with a different account they have to set everything back up again. Only serial number information is stored globally.
Do other applications on the machine retain preference type information?
Are there particular preferences that it isn't retaining or is everything being lost?
Is it 100% duplicable or is only certain machines and under certain circumstances?
Anything else you can let me know to start narrowing down the cause so I can help you find a solution would be great.
TIA
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quote:Originally posted by Marko:[QB]The problem I have is that the beam drawn from the lamps is actually comming from the hookclamp rather then from the lens. Any idea?? Thanks for your help.p.s.:this problem seams only to show up with a few symbols (eg.Selecon Pacific)VW 9.5.1QB]
Just add a 3-d locus point to the symbol where you would like the light to come from. The reason it works for some fixutres and not for others is that some of the fixutures are built out of nested symbols where there is one body definition symbol and then a couple of variants for the various lense angles. The 3-d locus is in the body definition but the instrument doesn't find it because it is hidden one level to deep.
HTH
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quote:Originally posted by AndyM7777:Although if I leave the fullness at the default and set the resolution to 256 it will dissapear in all but plan view.I did not have this problem before 9.5.1. Is this a new bug or just me?
This is a known bug that has been around for awhile. The curtain fails to draw in 3-d when the polygon count becomes too high. With a curtain with 6" of fullness and medium conversion resolution the limit is something like a 150' single curtain section.
It seems a little strange to me that you find you need the conversion resolution to be set so high to achieve a smooth curtain. I would think that the more likely cause of the jagginess would be the fact that it rendering to the screen which is an inherently low resolution output device. You might get better results by settin the Renderworks export resolution to a higher value for printing and image export in order to achieve better rendering output. The render bitmap tool also allows you to specify a rendering output resolution.
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quote:Originally posted by ekissam:i'm following all the directions about adding gobo projectors to the lights, and changing the custom renderworks options. however, when i go to actually render, all the furniture on my set is black. am i missing something intrinsic?
Your furniture is most likely on a different layer from the light source. Lights are basically layer specific so they'll only cast light on objects in the same layer. In order to see your whole model all together you'll want to create a layer link of the appropriate layer. Check out chapter 3 pg 13 of the VectorWorks 9.x manual for information on creating and using layer links.
HTH
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quote:Originally posted by csousawy:Why does associated dimensions work for 2d objects but not 3d?
Associative dimensioning is currently not supported for 3-d objects.
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quote:Originally posted by pscbimmer:I want a layer exclusively for my focus points, so I made one. The problem is that since it is its own layer, when I add one to my plot, lines under the focus point (i.e. the grid or seating areas) are still there even though the fill style is set at solid.
Check the stacking order of your layers in the layers dialog. The order they are presented in this list controls the drawing order for items in the drawing. A Layer that is above another layer in this list will always obscure items in the lower layer.
You might also check the layer transfer mode and experiment with different transfer modes to get the desired effect.
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quote:Originally posted by AndyM7777:I am having a problem rendering curtain objects. They look very jagged and like they are leaning over. I have 3d conversion set to high, custon renderworks with everything on.
See Pg 5-10 of the SpotLight manual for information on using the 3D Resolution parameter of the curtain to adjust the curtain's 3-d resolution.
Paperwork setup problem
in Entertainment
Posted
The generate paperwork command creates a worksheet in the drawing called "schedule formats" to store the column prefs for each schedule. Use the resource palette to go and delete this worksheet from the document. Then re-run the paperwork command and the setup.
HTH