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Adjust Candela of Multi Instance Fixtures


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Hello,

 

I am trying to render some images of a large festival concept for a client.  I have 148 ACME Pixel Line IP fixtures.  These are similar to the JDC Line, a 1 meter long led pixel bar with a strobe tube between two lines of RGB pixels.  

 

Typically when I have a large amount of fixtures like this I put them in emissive mode as they tend to crash the software or severely bog down my GPU.   The problem I am having is when I set them to be emissive the LEDs are not bright enough to convey the purpose of the fixture.  In the past when I set fixtures with large quantities or fixtures that put out too much light and kill processing into emissive, I will crank the Candela WAYYYY up and get a nice glow out of them and software is not having to process the light output.

 

Currently with this fixture the Candela option is grayed out and says multiple. The only lighting adjustment it appears that i can change is the beam multiplier and even setting this to .01 does not help and. When I select the sub directory of the fixture there is no lighting options.  Is there a way to easily adjust the light output of a multi instance device?

 

Ideally id like to have a nice glow from the fixture and still have pixel control.

 

ALSO, It would be really nice to have the option in vision to have lights NOT "highlight" when you select them, we don't always need this.  For example if I try to select all 148 of these fixtures they automatically light up and just about crash the software.  If it doesn't crash I have to wait several seconds till I can get to the Emissive check box and then several more seconds before the check registers. This seems like a simple option I should be able to disable, just like in real life we don't always need the fixtures to highlight when selecting them. 

 

I am including my MVR for your reference.

 

 

Thanks. 

Test23_Conecept_1_v1.4 MVRNo Scenic.mvr

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Yea, this is a tough situation. The only control you really have over the perceived brightness in this case is the Bloom Lens Strength and Exposure. But, these effect all lighting devices, not just the ACME Pixel Lines. The only code solution I can think of that doesn't run into technical limitations is exposing a Bloom Lens Strength value for each lighting device as well. Then, you could turn up just the bloom effect on these particular lights to get a brighter appearance.

 

I also had never considered the "highlight" case you talk about. It shouldn't, in theory, be too tough to implement an application preference for that.

 

Lastly, I'd like to investigate this file or this fixture in more detail when I can find some time. It also fully locked my machine up when I selected all 148 of them, which didn't necessarily surprise me given one of these devices has 48(??) lamps in our content (for a total of 7104 lamps). What DID surprise me, however, was MacOS reported something like 150GB of memory usage at the time of the lockup... which is alarming to say the least. I do think I had my settings cranked to max; meaning the light mask image was 2048x2048. So, that probably played into it. But, nevertheless, I just want to make sure we're not leaking memory or anything.

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Thank you for your response. This is not the first time I have run into this issue.  Before it was with the Chauvet Color Strike M fixtures.  I had a festival stage that had 90 units and each unit has 14 rgb lamps and 28 strobe lamps within it.  Having multi instance fixtures like this is very common and being able to adjust a fixtures sub instance luminance or reduce the distance of light that it is actually able to throw would be very valuable when trying to previz on larger rigs like the one I have here.   Ideally, being able to dial in the way individual lights are looking in Vision needs to be something that can be done quickly and easily. This way when we are rendering for a client we can really shape the final look of the renders to something exactly that we want to convey. 

 

Often I find with LED lights like this that create a "wash" or light up the entire environment absolutely destroy the ability to be effective with the software. 

 

Again Thank you,

 

 

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