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Color gel assignment not carried to vision.


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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

For starters, I want to make sure that you understand that as of 2020 SP2, Vision does not support reading gels out of GDTF. This means that in order to get custom gels over to Vision you must use ESC (for these specific fixtures at a minimum; I'd still suggest exporting geometry via MVR as the quality is far superior).

 

I also apologize, as this workflow is a little bizarre (and seems to be a result of the ESP Studios acquisition).

 

In VW, Lighting Devices have two different sets of color/gobo data; one for VGM/Renderworks and one for MVR/Vision. If you are filling out your color/gobo data in the OIP or if you are filling out color/gobo data in the Instrument Properties or Light Information tabs of the Edit dialog, then you are filling out only the VW side of things.

 

The data you want to look into setting is first and foremost the Fixture Mode. This allows you to select a Vision fixture resource inside of VW. These resources are much more intelligent that VW in that Vision knows how many channels a fixture is in a given mode; as well as how many gels/gobos a fixture supports. (Note: Sometimes we add extra gels/gobos for flexibility in our content.) Once this is performed, then the Edit dialog's Gobo/Color/Animation Wheels tabs should be populated with Vision information. Once you fill out the Vision portion of the fixture, exporting via ESC (or Send to Vision as 2020 SP2 Send to Vision still uses ESC file format) should work well for you!

 

Also a heads up, we are investigating better GDTF support for Vision such that this "ESC workaround" is no longer necessary. ESC is a dying format, and we want to make the full switch over to GDTF/MVR. However, we need to keep ESC around for cases GDTF doesn't yet cover.

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I'm not using GDTF yet, but rather "Send to Vision" function. While VWX can recognize the color assignment, it just doesn't map to the color wheels in Vision. 
Moreover, it is quite tedious to use the edit function to assign colors, as it will only modify one fixture at a time, even if multiple are selected. 

Is your suggestion to switch over to GDTF anyway? Does it support the merge function?

Cheers  

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Just to add to Brandon's comment, you can group select fixtures of the same type in Vision and assign colour/gels there, which will quicker than doing it in the Spotlight dialogue and use the colour field in the OIP to keep your paperwork up to date(if needed). 

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7 hours ago, jcogdell said:

Just to add to Brandon's comment, you can group select fixtures of the same type in Vision and assign colour/gels there, which will quicker than doing it in the Spotlight dialogue and use the colour field in the OIP to keep your paperwork up to date(if needed). 

That is what I'm currently doing. I was hoping for a less tedious solution.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I think it is just that when Vision was originally implemented way back when, they treated gels the same way as they treated gobos and that's carried forward; they are essentially interchangeable from a rendering standpoint. I could be wrong, but I think the original crew through some extra wheels in the content just in case; you can safely ignore them if you do not need them 😉

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I'm not sure if a ticket has been opened or not, but we can certainly look into it. I'm guessing most Vision users are just used to the old workflow or aren't reaching the right people to get things resolved.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I'm glad it's getting more stable for you! I opened an enhancement in JIRA with some suggestions as to how we could solve this. I linked to this forum post, so feel free to leave additional notes/comments here!

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  • 3 months later...

I would like to add a plus one to Jake's request here. It seems crazy to have to manually add the colour to every generic fixture in the rig. And then to have to do it again when you make an update on your plan would be enough to convince me not to use Vision. Which is a shame because I'd really like too

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

One thing to remember you can group assign colors/gels to fixtures in Vision.

Also if you are using the new MVR file to send updates to Vision you can set it up to only update the modified fixtures and not the whole design. Export an MVR which contains only the updated fixtures and changes, not your whole design, and then merge it into your Vision file.

Personally I use the color field in the Spotlight lighting device OIP for documentation and only assign gels to conventional fixtures once I have loaded the design into Vision, as its a faster workflow.

 

Moving forwards we are working on updating how Spotlight handles lighting fixtures. We are looking at every aspect of the lighting device including performance, UI dialogues, workflow (such as being able to easily add gels to multiple fixtures at once) and tasks like setting up lighting looks for rendering. This is a huge project and will be implemented in stages over the next couple of years, the first stage was rolled out with the recent SP3 release and significantly improved the performance of the lighting device object.

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I'll play around with exporting only the updated fixtures. 

I really only use vectorworks for producing plans for the crew to rig. Right now seems a good time to play around with visualizers, which have never really clicked with me. So I know I'm a harsh critic. Hopefully exporting updated fixtures only will prove far more workable. But I can predict that having to reassign the colour to every fixture when I send from Vectorworks to Vision will be enough to prevent me from using Vision after a couple of plans. I thought it worth leaving a comment. Everything else about is has been very easy and intuitive.

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After some dinner and a beer I have made a discovery which I'm sharing here for anyone else finding the lack of colour information for generic fixtures transferring from Vectrworks to Vision ultimately frustrating. If you edit the fixture, either by pressing the edit button in the OIP or double click the fixture you can edit the colour wheel of that instrument. Unfortunately you can't just type the colour by gel no. but if you have 'Active Document' selected in the colour picker you will see the colour name show up when you hover the mouse over the appropriate colour. This will transfer from Vectorworks to Vision every time. I'm sure that between now and when the theatres open again I can write a script to automate that.

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  • 3 weeks later...

For those of us who are doing work with conventional fixtures this issue is VERY important to resolve. I have sent this question to Service Select and spoken to techs multiple times and they don't seem to have an answer, so maybe let them know that there is a clunky fix now. When you have many colors in a show with a lot of booms this is a LOOOOOONG process.

 

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