Design layer Viewports to MVR

[StephenHuman]

Hi Everyone!

 

Would love some advice on how to make this a faster process 

 

Example problem:

I have created lighting design for Audio delay towers at a festival.

There is at least 20 towers placed around the venue.

After creating one of the towers (tower 1), instead of duplicating I can use create viewport to place them around the venue in the spots I need on a design layer.

This is a faster workflow especially if changes need to be made to the tower design

But because they are only viewport references, the fixtures on all the towers aside from Tower 1 are not editable 

 

Is there a way to once I am happy with the design and placement, populate those viewports with the actual towers? so then the fixtures can be assigned addresses and work once I then export an MVR

 

Or is there a better workflow to do this?

 

The problem really stems from when the tower design changes later in the process and I have to manually go to every tower and replace fixtures / move things around to fit the new design, which can be very tedious 

 

Many Thanks!

[Pat Stanford]

Likely that someone who actually does lighting design work has a better option, but you are basically using the Viewports kind of like a Symbol.

 

If you made a Symbol of Tower 1, then once you were ready to Customize you could Convert to Group and either ungroup it or edit the group and you would have separate  instances of everything for numbering and reporting.

 

My  $0.02

[jcogdell]

@StephenHuman

Sorry, the only option would be to duplicate the original tower and lights, once you are happy with its configuration, and place the duplicates into the correct locations.
MVR like Spotlight relies on the lights and other objects being unique otherwise there is no way to associate the patch data (or any other data) with an individual light.

 

[JBenghiat]

Seconding Pat's suggestion. Create symbols instead of viewports. Once you're ready to start assigning control data, Convert to group (this is a named command, not to be confused with Group to Ungroup).

 

You can think of a viewport as a smart photocopy -- a way to duplicate a drawing element for presentation or to show an alternate position.

[StephenHuman]

Thanks everyone for jumping in with suggestions, I like the symbol option 

Never thought of converting it back from a symbol to a group, thats smart 

 

Will give this workflow a go and see if it speeds things up a bit