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Hello,

I've been very excited to get started playing around with marionette. My goal was to start with a fairly simple project to start learning, and something that would work for our company (we have to create 2d plots quickly (utilizing mostly booms). This is hopefully the start of a number of objects I'll be able to create in Marionette. I have a *little* bit of python experience which has helped a ton.

There are a few bugs that I know of - the text field doesn't work well with booms that are fractions of full feet, but for our purposes we only do booms that are full feet anyway so it's lower priority.

I want to organize some sections of the script into wrappers since it's a bit messy at the moment.

I'd love some feedback if anyone has any thoughts on a better/more efficient implementation.

Thanks!

Edited by Stephen Sorenson
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Hi,

I am new at this also but just looking at the output you can achieve this much in simpler way, but maybe you are wanting to achieve much more.

See attached.

I looked at your website, Amazing, what beautiful lighting work on the sets. would be just captivating just to watch the lighting changes, and this all done initially in VW Spotlight?

Edited by Alan Woodwell
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Alan - thank you for your input!

I was trying to achieve something specific (which is mostly controlled by our workflow at my office for my day job - hence all the complicated inputs - they were features requested by the rest of our drafting team). It also has to work in object mode for some of our less experienced drafters - I'm dropping it into our corporate symbol library. The boom label is so our on site techs know what size boom we're using, and I was trying to replace our folder of about 10 different size towers (and every time we wanted to update something we had to go through and update all 10 symbols).

By the way I think the reason the rotation didn't work properly is because it was passed through to a group. I tried sending the circle and rectangle directly into the rotation and it worked in object mode. Haven't gotten the loci to work yet through the object mode in your version, but if I do I think that the rotation after creation that you've done will probably update faster than the way I did it by offsetting from the top - I notice a delay in mine that doesn't exist in yours.

I think I will incorporate the div/size/series sequence to create the number of loci. That will get rid of one of my input nodes.

I also remembered how stupid imperial measurement is once again. Would make things a lot easier for display.

I have to say that I've been so excited by this project that I'm working on it on the couch on my day off.

Thank you for the kind words regarding my lighting designs! I don't do much lighting rendering in spotlight on my home computer - it's a bit too resource intensive for my 4 year old macbook pro, but I do all of my plots in it.

I work part time during the day for an event company and then do my own theatrical designs on the side and in between.

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Stephen,

The first one I did ran ok even through a group, see attached.

It seemed to stop after the node inserts so I am sure its something simple when I sit back and look at it. There is also no send to back nodes and the only way to get the boom in front of the base was to place the pass node in before group. Also I found that creating the whole object first then rotated seems the simplest way to resolve all the geometry.

I don't fully understand what a lot of the other nodes are that exist (like control geometry etc) and I don't have any programming experience, but I love this sort of thing.

I would love to see the final result because this is forum is where a lot of the learning is coming from at present with Marionette.

Good luck and keep at those lighting design, still amazed at them.

Regards

Alan

Edited by Alan Woodwell
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  • 2 weeks later...

So, I made a couple nodes to help (send forward, send backward, send to front, send to back).

Also hidden in my original boom file is an add surface node that I made to accomplish the bottom of the pipe being rounded.

The move backwards/move to back seems to only work in the object node or wrapper, and the forward/front was working, but on further testing couldn't get it to work consistently. I'll keep working on it, but it may be one set of nodes will work in one drawing and the other set will work in another. So I'll leave these here for now with the caveat that they haven't been working consistently.

Edited by Stephen Sorenson
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I did test the send to front and send to back in a simple object in an object node and they seemed to work as expected. Did not test the other two.

After further testing I have found some weirdness with them, must be what you found. They move forward/to front seems to not work sometimes (which is odd because it's the first one I made and it seemed to work consistently) and the move to back/move backwards only works in an object node or wrapper.

I think it might be sending to front or backwards before the other objects are created which might be why it only works in one direction depending on the object.

I'm going to leave it here for now, see if I can get it working, but put a caveat on the original post.

Currently I'm trying to get insertion rotation to (a) show up in the OIP and/or (b) find a way to get that information so that I can reverse rotate the text so it is always right reading.

Edited by Stephen Sorenson
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  • Marionette Maven

Ah! Okay! That's it.

Because you created an object with them, it appears that they work correctly. If you were to just run an unwrapped/non-object network, they don't behave the same way.

So essentially, it appears that within a Marionette Object (essentially a plug-in object) the nodes will behave as desired, but if you run an unwrapped network, results may not be as expected.

I don't think that tweaking the node will be enough to get it to properly work outside of the Marionette object. I'll see what can be done on our end to *hopefully* get it to behave as expected more often. It's most likely an underlying issue with the application's implementation of Marionette as a whole.

Thanks for helping me recognize this!

Marissa

Edited by MarissaF
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