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Applying a Texture to a Lighitng Fixture GDTF


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Does anybody know if it is possible to apply a texture to a lighting fixture?

I have a 3D polygon that has a texture within Vectorworks. I have then turned this into a Lighting Fixture using the GDTF builder.

When importing into Vision, it drops the texture that is applied to the 3D polygon and just renders as black.

Within settings, i have fixture render set to on as opposed to black.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Vision currently does not support custom texturing on Lighting Devices. You did do the right thing by turning Render Fixtures to On. But, that will just render our hardcoded textures; which is still arguably better quality wise than forcing fixtures to black 😛 But yea, Vision does not support the functionality that you are trying to accomplish with those custom textures.

 

That being said, there was no real reason behind this restriction. We mostly noticed that fixtures almost always had no textures. And, so forcing the hard coded ones was not an issue. I can bring this up in some of our internal meetings and see what it might take to expose/handle more custom textures for Lighting Devices.

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It would be AMAZING if you wouldn't mind raising it for consideration.

I use Vision to do pixel mapping on a Christmas Tree every year and the tree branches (lighting fixtures) are Green with RGBW LEDs on them.

I would love the ability to at least apply a solid colour to the fixture to make the Vision file look that bit more realistic for showing clients.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

That's definitely an interesting use case and one where I can see that being valuable! Appreciate you explaining your workflow. It makes it that much more relatable when discussing the issue with others. Thanks, again!

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I have 'found' a work around for my texture applied to a fixture dream. Tested and seems to do what I wanted...

As they are just a 3D polygon with LEDs attached to it. No pan or tilt attributes. I have exported and ESC file and then merged an MVR using GDTF fixture over the top.

I have then turned render fixtures off within settings. I now have the colour and texture I wanted while still being able to see output from the fixtures.

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An update to this idea is after saving the file with render fixtures set to "off", exiting vision and then load back into the Vision file, I have to turn render fixtures back to "On" to have output of the LED. I can turn render back to "Off" once they are working.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Sorry it took me so long to get around to trying to reproduce this. Could you maybe post your file? I just tried with litfiles and GDTF and both worked on the first try after launching Vision from scratch with Render Fixtures set to Off. I wonder if it is some setting in your document or perhaps the specific GDTF you are using. It may also be worth posting a screenshot of your Vision Preferences (the application settings dialog for rendering quality that has the Performance / Quality slider, not the document settings dialog). Thanks!

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  • 2 weeks later...

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