mjm

I can't tell you how many times I have seen THAT

Love this. Between this idea and added gumball function, that'd be slammin'. But please, first lets make VW work reliably.

Ok, now that's funny

Thanks TimC, I'll check this out soon

^bump

Oh how I love this thread! I got one: Sometime in the early early 90's in a former communist concrete palace of entertainment, just then being converted to a performing arts space by a young Hungarian guy, passionate about contemporary dance. He created opportunities for small dance companies, like the many I worked for in NYC. Anyways, I found myself on the top of a box truss 25' or so above the concrete deck facing the rasty old Hungarian head electrician holding the local equivalent of a two by four which he was threatening to club me with. Why? Well, aside the contretemps he and I had had about hanging my additions to the house rep plot, he was there to 'protect' me. I focusing the rig myself, mostly old PAR 64s. Not a one had a porcelain, they all had bare end lugs. At 220V he was there to break the connection should I do something stupid like reach in to rotate the lamp as one was wont to do back in those days.

Yep, thanks again!

@Andy Broomell, thank you. Had a huge blind spot around this but knew I was missing something.

Ok; I just got done trying the blur portion of the Plastic reflectivity shader, danged if I can see a difference. What do I not understand? BLUR Thought experiment.vwx

I called VSS support about something very much like this a few days ago, because it was driving me up the wall. It appears that the last item in an instrument Summary gets truncated. The advice was to add a 'dummy item' to the list and make in each Instrument Summary / Position Summary that it is placed last. See the attached image. So I made one. Solves this irritating problem for the short term. @klinzeyBut is it true that each instrument summary requires individual updating? What am I doing incorrectly when I try to globally build a list of fixtures for all instrument summaries (one current show has 26 of them).

Gosh, I'm hoping I see an answer easier than my practice, which is to create orthogonal viewports, which inside their annotation space I can derive measurements / place dims correctly.

Also, OPT+Z on Mac OS / ALT+Z on Windows get you there

Ah, the good ole days!

Not only lamps, but color as well they'd go through. When in tune though, they sang. Of course I'd run into them as the third fixture from centerline in Someone's Rep Plot Somewhere, all the rest being Altman Off Axial fixtures and the wash would be lumpy as bad gravy. Growing up in a small town outside NYC I came up in equity summer stock theater where on the weekends we'd showcase a great many of the NYC dance companies as they began their summer tours. Three racks - eventually four - of six handle autotransformer dimmers. A nightmare. When I toured the college theater department in and saw the wall-sized "computer lighting board" I knew life was going to get much much better.

And again today. After waiting 36 minutes for the render to complete I decided to eff it and quit the app (VW 2019), consequences be damned. Clicked Vectorworks menu, chose Quit and voila! I was instantly kicked to the 'Quit VW, you want to Don't Save-Cancel-Save' dialog pane. Choose cancel!!! That kills the render and allows the continuation of work. See the brief attached movie, in which you cannot see me hit CMD+period or ESC repeatedly, till I then choose the Quit VW menu item. Render, I command you to stop.mp4

May I say that at the time, the fixture was a stellar addition to most anyone's lighting inventory. A truly flat sharp field, miles better than the same generation of Altmans.

Kevin; thanks for your comments about both the improvements and the continued bugs. Just saying that the last several days of truly simple 3d Modelling has produced an endless array of display issues and crashes. So much so that I am again pushing projects begun in 2019 back into 2018, just to get work done.

Awesome, love me some workaround.Thanks @markdd. And I do occasionally still run across this in 2019.

Sooo irritating when this happens, arbitrary is the correct adjective.

Just ran into this yesterday.

Ah, yes of course, you are correct about that pain

Are you speaking about the 2D or 3D representation? in 2D it is a trivial task to select fixtures singly or globally, then rotate them in the OIP in the Rotation Field to whatever degree you wish for PAN, as tilt is not visualized in 2D. 3D is another story altogether…

thanks for the heads-up

thanks Jeremy. Found and installed. Can't wait to have a reason to use it.

OK, so plot done, dropboxed to shop, all is well, til the swaps, count and other changes occur. Deadlines are now, as they tend to be at this point in the process. The Instrument Summary tool in 2019 appears to be failing. Please see attached movie, where you'll notice truncated text in the "Build List" tool, swapping out for the correct item fails repeatedly / continuously, so no fresh plot to the shop. SO not good. Since productivity on this project has stopped, I took the time away from other projects to reach out here for assistance. All help gratefully received! No, I can not upload the file, nda and all that. Yes, I did check to be sure all items are attached to hanging position. EDIT: Just chatted with Juan in Priority Support, who says this is a known problem without a current fix, but with a workaround: "Add a dummy field as last item, so that becomes the hidden item" or words to that effect. I'll report back here shortly. OK, the workaround works: 1] created, then added a dummy fixture to document resource folder 2] executed the steps as shown in second movie, which basically equates to adding the dummy fixture as the last item in the summary But you'll also notice that when multiple Inst Summaries are selected and acted upon, only the first in that selection becomes modified, so every single summary must be touched individually, in order correct the issue. Upwards of thirty of those on my current document. Anyone know why this is? Inst Sum Nightmare.mp4 Instrument Summary Nightmare workaround.mp4