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Rendering w/ Spotlight


djobbins

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Hey guys,

I have 2 questions

I am wondering if there is a faster way to render light output with lighting instruments. Right now the process just seems so clunky I have to think there is a better way.

Right now its:

-Place lighting instrument

-place focus point

-"focus" instrument to focus point

-Turn light on

Then if there is a gobo or lit fog there are additional steps. If you're working with more than a few fixtures this process is extremely time consuming.

Also, it there away to soften a gobo texture? Similar to if you ran the barrel out in real life?

Thanks!

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

You can also select multiple instruments all at once and focus them to either a designated focus point, or one you click on after the fact with Spotlight > Focus Instruments. No need to do it one at a time for every instrument, that should save you a lot of steps. You can also reassign focus points in this manner later on.

The lights can all be turned on or off in bulk too in the Visualization palette, which if you don't have enable can be turned on under Window > Palettes > Visualization.

(Not sure if you can control lit fog for multiple objects at once however, there are some things that multiple modifications allows and some it does not, depending on the types of objects selected.)

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Give your instrument a channel assignment and/or purpose. The Vis Palette will list them as

Channel Purpose then the unique ID number.

To insert a gobo: Select the instrument, in the OIP click on Edit.

In the Light Information Tab next to Gobo 1 click Get Resource. This will display a few default gobo textures and any gobo textures you've imported into your drawing.

hth

mk

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Thanks MK. That's a big help to know about the vis palette.

For the gobos, inserting gobos wasn't the problem. I was trying to find a way to not have them render super sharp, but with the edges blurred out, so it would look more like how we would actually focus a gobo wash in real life. The best I came up with is to download a gobo image and blur it out in a photo editing program, then create a new texture from the blurred image. It's a little time consuming so I'll probably spend some of my downtime just making a library of fuzzy gobo textures.

Thanks!

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I do the same. One thing that I found helpful is a phone app called Morie' that was produced by Wybron. It may not be available anymore as Wybron is gone. Regardless, you could call up a gobo from a wide variety of sources and then adjust the focus on your phone. I would take a shot of that and transfer to my computer. A quick trim on the image and it was good to go. That is a lot quicker than going through editing in a graphics application.

Another quick hint is to keep several iterations of focus positions in your working template. You then move them into place per your new design without going through all the hassle of creating and naming focus positions each time.

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