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Can you see these lights?


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I had a light symbol that was working. Then I made a minor geometric change to the base object "Nexera Base", and now the system is bugging out and won't show the body of the light in the world space, or render the beam. The theater file was too big, so I copy&pasted 2 lights to a new file. The bodies appear in wireframe and disappear in open GL or fast render. "Default Instrument Texture" is assigned to every shape in the body. All classes & layers are turned on. When I edit the top symbol "Nexera Profile" the body appears. When I inspect the intermediate symbol called "Nexera DON'T EDIT OR DELETE", it has a 3d locus at the right place, an object assigned as base=true, one with yoke=true, and a group with body=true. The light beam itself will not render in any mode.

When you open the file, do you see these problems, or are they phantasms of my machine in particular?

Edited by Stage63
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Here's more evidence that vectorworks has trouble updating light symbols. Screenshots taken of THE SAME SYMBOL just 5 seconds apart show the same thing with different render properties.

I've refreshed this symbol many times using "command /" with no result.

[Edit: I meant to clip the document name in those shots ... my bad]

Edited by Stage63
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After changing EVERY maeterial of and every color property at every level of the symbol, and then UNDOING those changes, and saving and closing and opening and repeating ad nauseam, I FINALLY got the lights to appear, with their photometric properties restored. (So I don't have to loose everything I did this week.)

I copied and pasted the VISIBLE, RENDERABLE lights into a blank document to analyze, and they promptly disappeared (except the yoke & clamp of course).

Here's a hypothesis:

Does VectorWorks have a symbol/group-nesting limit (symbol within a group within a symbol within a symbol), beyond which alterations made will not update all the way through to the top level? Am I pushing the nesting limit beyond what it's designed to handle?

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There is no limit for nesting (that I've ever bumped up against).

Not sure I follow the exact chain of events in your instrument symbol woes, but I suspect one of two things may have happened.

1. You imported another version of the Default Instrument Texture when you imported a lighting symbol.

2. Occasionally lights need to be refreshed. This may still happen in 2014, but I know it happened more in 2013.

What you did probably forced the instruments to refresh.

Spotlight > Refresh Instruments or Tools > Utilities > Reset All Plug-Ins would probably have fixed it also. Or selecting all the instruments and nudging them to the left and back to the right.

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