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Hard/ Soft Focus


maxbowman

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I'm not sure if this would be a good question for here or the Renderworks section, but:

I'm doing renderings of lighting looks in Vectorworks, and I'm having trouble adjusting the "sharpness" of instruments. I believe it has something to do with the information in the object info palette for the the light that just needs tweaked, but I might be mistaken. If anybody knows a good way to explain this to me i would greatful.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Are these Lighting Instruments? If so, you can adjust the Beam Angle and the Field Angle in numbers of degrees. If the Field Angle is larger than the Beam Angle, you'll get a soft edge. If the values are the same, you'll get a hard, sharp edge.

If you are just using the Light tool from the Visualization palette, you can adjust the beam and spread angle on the Object Info palette.

Hope that helps!

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  • 8 years later...

I just found this helpful insight.  However it doesn't seem like the "soft focus" shows in fast renderworks or final renderworks.  So trying to have a shutter cut with a piece of "frost" in the unit so that the beam is soft doesn't seem possible.  Is there something I'm missing?

 

Thank you for the help.

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I think that once a gobo is inserted into a lighting device (and for this example, a shutter is a type of gobo) then the focus edge no longer applies. I’ve never tried looking for the “soft shadows” option in a lighting device so I don’t know if it is there. If it is, you still would not have control over the level of frost, just an on off option.

 

For soft edge gobos, you can create the gobo texture with a blur to simulate that. It works really well but the only control over softness would be re-importing different iterations of the graphic image. You could do the same thing creating a shutter cut gobo. It would take a little trial and error to get it right but perhaps not too long. Also, note that you can adjust the beam and field size of a static lens. Just because a fixture is 19 degrees doesn’t mean you can’t make it wider or narrower to place your shutter cut where you want it. There is always a balance between the amount of effort required vs. the desire for the result. 

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