Venue Drawing Standards (from a rigger's perspective)

[Wood]

I'm sure many of us here work with plenty of strange venue drawings, usually pulled out of a DWG with little attention paid to cleanup. I'd like to start a discussion about the best way to start a fresh show file, beginning with having the venue drawing standardized. So many times the venue is nowhere near the drawing origin, is in a crazy scale, etc. This all adds to workload as we have to move our template viewports around, transpose origins, deal with changing scale as we import other department's layers, etc. Obviously Project files eliminate some of this, but many of us still find it more efficient to work in our own file before interacting with the group master drawing. 

 

The venue layer is the foundation of the show file. With that in mind, here's what I like to see. Please add your thoughts!

 

Document and user origin aligned, with all of this being show zero. This point should be based on readily identifiable accurate building architecture. Examples of this for XY would be:

Stage lip and center of the proscenium.

An intersection of two beams in an arena, or at the center of the bowl or show floor where there is often a permanent mark in the concrete

An intersection of an airwall track or a house rigging point in a ballroom. Don't trust soffits or walls, they're often wrong. 

For Z: Concrete of the arena floor, the stage deck in a theater, or the carpet in a ballroom etc. 

 

Ultimately, this point should be readily identifiable both on the venue drawing and when you walk into the venue, WITHOUT NEEDING A TAPE MEASURE. I've seen many shows layout in the wrong spot because somebody decided that show zero should be an arbitrary distance from some arbitrary point like a wall sconce that is not accurate to reality. I like to use things that are made of steel, because the iron holding up the building is generally pretty accurate, whereas things like remodels and new coping or trim can change wall dimensions and not get captured on a new venue drawing. Beams generally don't move. Moving show zero to your temporary stage is not helpful to the layout team. The hoists don't care where your stage is, they care where the beams are.

 

Depending on shape of the venue, Upstage should be Y positive or X Positive. Arenas and stadiums almost always benefit from having the stage area X positive (50 yard or centerfield line runs along the Y axis. Theatres should typically have the stage Y positive, with the lip of the stage (or plaster line) running along the X axis. Ultimately, put it in the orientation that fits the important bits onto a landscape sheet without requiring rotation.

If it's important to you to work with Upstage facing up in your design layers no matter what, please use the rotate plan feature so the rest of us don't have to rework all of our sheet templates. If you want to confuse the heck out of people, rotate your sheet viewport so that Y positive isn't up when holding the plan in your hands. (Don't do this).

 

Scale. Again, please make the important bits fit into a standard sheet size, like an ARCH D sheet in landscape. We probably don't need the entire arena to fit in that space, but the show floor and maybe a good amount of the lower bowl (if you plan on hanging truss there) is great. Scale in the design layer DOES MATTER. Having it wrong is annoying when annotating or using zoom shortcuts. 

 

For the building geometry itself, please stop grouping everything into class 0, none etc. If the base drawing has classes that allow us to turn off beams, pipes, etc please keep that intact. Turning the venue into a symbol can be useful, but I find that it makes the visibility tool difficult to use, and eliminates the ability to see what components might be, because clicking on a line activates the entire symbol.

LOCK the geometry before you start drawing! More than once I've received drawings where key pieces of the architecture like rigging beams have been inadvertently nudged, which can lead to catastrophe during load in if not caught early on. A smart draftsman references in their Venue so that it can't be changed. I prefer old style layer references vs a viewport. Viewports eliminate too much functionality, such as being able to see a light fixture's weight and calculate it in braceworks

 

 

What may seem like a non-issue to you as a person dropping in lighting fixtures or speakers, can be a huge annoyance and add hours of work for the folks that have to assure that all of this stuff lines up in the building.

That isn't a jab at other departments, but the reality is that truss and audio motors are usually already in place when your work begins, so you don't typically see the consequences of drawing bugaboos and inaccuracies. The lights don't care where the truss is(within reason), but the custom scenic surround that builds up from the stage deck to mate with a flown LED wall really does. And in today's high end shows, fractions of inches matter.

 

 

 

Sorry for the treatise, but please add your thoughts on best practices, so that we can all make each other's lives easier and more efficient! I very well may be wrong on some of these opinions, and I'd love to know the best way!

 

 

 

 

[jcogdell]

A couple of things that may help in regards to the points that @Wood raises

• Use a shuttle file to test and configure the DWG import before adding the DWG into a design file.
  This is the process of importing the DWG into an empty file, were you can check how its coming into Spotlight and then make any necessary changes to the import settings, the origin point, delete un-needed resources in the resource manager or in extreme case explode (breaking all the blocks into basic geometry) the DWG to help maintain performance in Spotlight.
• As mentioned above reference the venue geometry, a shuttle file provides an ideal source for this.
• Learn and take advantage of the advanced DWG import settings, in recent years several really powerful options like class and layer mapping, adding prefixs to DWG related classes and being able to control what layers of the DWG are going to be imported have been added.

[Wood]

@jcogdelldo you folks have a guide for this that can get us a bit more detail on best practices for importing DWG? I haven't had time to search the University but is there a PDF or coffee break that covers this? Mastering Venue import is a hole in my skill set, and I'd love to learn 'the right way' to keep performance up, and ultimately have useful Classes after dealing with the apparent nonsense of most DWG organization methods. 

 

Do exploded blocks (which import as groups if I'm not mistaken) perform better as just straight geometry if we can't dedicated the time to convert them to symbols?

[jcogdell]

@Wood
I know there's not anything from the Ent side but there may well be something by the architect team on the university.
I'll add it to the ent teams list of potential webinar and coffe break subjects
Otherwise there have been a number of fairly detailed discussions here on the forums about the best practices for DWG importing.

[Scott C. Parker]

17 hours ago, Wood said:

guide for this that can get us a bit more detail on best practices for importing DWG

USITT had an article several years ago covering this. Here's a link to a text version that could be helpful. Unfortunately, it's missing the screenshots. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Vectorworks+to+AutoCAD+and+back.-a0472370414
I'm looking for the actual article, but spring cleaning from the past may have spelled its demise. 

 

[Wood]

Thanks for the knowledge folks!