Non-Horizontal Lighting Positions - 2D views and true 3D positions for export

[Daniel Dickman]

Hello everyone,

For a while now, I have been struggling to find an efficient workflow for drawing non-horizontal lighting positions in Vectorworks. The challenge I'm having is finding the best way to only have 1 instance of each fixture in both 2D and 3D views. For my purposes, accurate 3D positioning of the whole rig is incredibly important as my end goal is to export the plot into GrandMA2 for programming. 2D views are equally important for clean plots, hang tapes, etc. 

I have been playing with the Vectorworks visualization tool called "Create Plot and Model View." [app-help.vectorworks.net] I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with it and have seen a lot of posts here regarding it. This tool lets you draw your non-horizontal positions in 2D/Plan View and then create a design layer viewport that shows a 3D model of the position that you can then rotate and position in space accurately. At first, this functionality seems great because I can use the 2D views for label legends, plots and hang tapes. At the same time I can have a true to life 3D model for photometrics, renderings and I had hoped for accurate MA2 export. 

Where I'm struggling with this tool is that the 3D model view is just a 3D viewport referenced from the fixtures/positions drawn in 2D/Plan view. If you attempt to run the MA2 export plugin, all of the the non-horizontal positional will use the fixture positioning from the 2D/Plan View where the fixtures were created/defined. (On the ground, horizontally) 

For shows that have these non-horizontal positions, the only way I have found to accurately get these positions to export correctly into MA3D is to draw them entirely in 3D. This ends up being very cumbersome when you want to create plots and hang tapes. 

Is there any way to pull the position information from the 3D viewport of the lighting fixtures created with "create plot and model view?"

[markdd]

I'm afraid that at the moment the answer to your question appears to be no. If you have used the CPMV function to generate non-horizontal lighting positions, then as you have found out, the resulting viewports do not export into any of the visualisers that I have used.

 

What I have started to develop is a different approach to the traditional schematic representations that we all understand, and by using a combination of section views combined with 3D label legends I have found that most instances can be represented clearly enough. This is becoming easier still as now instruments and positions can be freely rotated to any angles you require without too much difficulty.

 

However, this in my view is not ideal, and I cannot imagine that it is beyond the skills of the engineers at Vectorworks to soon have the ability to export the hanging data of Lighting Devices and Hanging positions within design layer viewports sometime soon.

 

Enough people have been calling for this functionality and for Vectorworks to really work well with Vision, and be a truly compelling solution, especially in the music and events industry where client presentations are paramount, I can't believe that the engineers at Vectorworks won't be engaged with this right now.