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Hello everyone

 

I am working on a show, where we want to pre visualise a lot of stage element movements. 

They go on every axes, and rotate. 

 

My problem is, the rotation. 

Is it possible to change the anchor point of a object in Vision? 

 

It seems as it takes the 0;0;0 coordinate as default anchor point as default. 

 

Best from Mathias 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

This is actually an issue that has been coming up a lot recently, but one that takes a lot more work to implement in both VW/Vision than I'd have imagined. What we'd like to do, is get some UI/UX in VW such that you can set everything up there and send it over to Vision via MVR. Now, I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice to have this same UI/UX in Vision! I think that is a requirement as well as you very well may need to make adjustments in Vision once things are moving around.

 

 

I digress; due to the way Vision is designed, and due to the way VW is exporting MVR, there is a workaround but it is not simple nor straight forward. But, it works.

 

Essentially, you want to make a new layer in the Scene Graph. This layer, by default, has an origin of (0,0,0). You can then drag'n'drop a group of items that move together (say a truss and all the fixtures on it, or even multiple stage elements that happen to move together) into this newly created layer. Once this is done, you will need to reposition all of the children inside of this layer, and you will need to reposition the layer itself.

 

The last step is applying the DMX Rotation to the layer you created as opposed to the moving elements themselves. Since this will rotate all of the layers children, this should accomplish what you need.

 

The hard part about this workflow is the positioning of the layer and the children inside of it, and getting that just right so that the elements rotate around the desired anchor point as you've described.

 

Either way, hopefully this helps and this is definitely something we're trying to solve sooner than later!

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

One last thing! It always sucks when merging an MVR into an existing document in Vision wipes out certain changes you've made inside of Vision.

 

I highly recommend once you start applying changes in Vision that you save to v3s so they aren't lost! But more importantly, that you only export items from VW into MVR that need updated moving forward. This means that only those items will get recreated in Vision when you merge the MVR. This should hopefully reduce the amount of "crap, merge mvr wiped my xforms" comments 😛

 

Edit: Also, as many may not know this, if you ever perform an MVR merge and it breaks something, just hit Undo once! It should undo everything the merge did and get you back to a good state 😉

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5 hours ago, bbudzon said:

Essentially, you want to make a new layer in the Scene Graph. This layer, by default, has an origin of (0,0,0). You can then drag'n'drop a group of items that move together (say a truss and all the fixtures on it, or even multiple stage elements that happen to move together) into this newly created layer. Once this is done, you will need to reposition all of the children inside of this layer, and you will need to reposition the layer itself.

 

The last step is applying the DMX Rotation to the layer you created as opposed to the moving elements themselves. Since this will rotate all of the layers children, this should accomplish what you need.

 

I am trying to get my head around this. 

I do understand your point, about the layer, and rotating that. 

 

However it seems like the the anchor point stays with the object. 

Am I right in assuming, that if I want to make an object rotate around its center axes, I should import it at the 0;0;0 origin, and move it in vision, instead of Vector Works? 

 

 

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Having just gone through this process myself I will try and offer a little help that worked for us.

 

Go through your Vectorworks file and figure out where you want the pivot point to be. (in our case I created a simple box symbol symbol, and made it a lighting instrument) This allowed me to leverage a worksheet to make a nice list of all my pivot points that I could print out. (pivot point name for organization, and then X,Y and Z position - in inches based on document units)

 

Exported that list to Excel. Reason we did this was so we could swap Y and Z positions before entering them into Vision (as they have different coordinate systems) and that always gets confusing to remember.

 

Then in Vision we created a New layer in the Scene Graph for each rotation transform we wanted. For each new layer, we named them accordingly (ie. Truss 1 Transform Rotate) and adjust the X,Y and Z position of the layer to match with the pivot point we figured out from Vectorworks.(this is where having the pivot point figured out already sped things up, kinda)

 

For each transform we exported a .mvr that only included the truss, objects and lights needed for that transform. You merge each .mvr in to your file one at a time. After each import you can drag the .mvr layer "into" the associated layer you created to nest it inside the transform layer. 

 

Adjust the DMX transform data as needed in your high level transform layer to get the rotations as you need them, and the nested layers follow suit.

 

We found it helpful to export our Truss in a vertical orientation from Vectorworks using the same pivot point we wanted. That way we could default the DMX transform channel in the console to 50%. This allowed us to rotate the truss both positive and negative directions without needing to nest yet another dummy layer for transforms.

 

I hope this helps.

 

I hope that there can be work done in this area to make this process easier. The future of integrated previz is already here, it would be nice to have a better workflow.

 

Cheers!

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
23 hours ago, mhersland said:

It seems as it takes the 0;0;0 coordinate as default anchor point as default. 

I don't think this portion of the original post settled in for me until just now.

tldr; Try applying a rotation in the Property Window to different items/parents/children in the Scene Graph to get different results. One of the items/rotations may be exactly the anchor point you need.


One thing that is important, especially with MVR, is that you are working with the right item in the Scene Graph.

There are various levels to an MVR object; an it isn't necessarily intuitive the way it is displayed in the UI right now.

It may be that no matter what you rotate in the Scene Graph, it is not giving the desired anchor point. In this case, following @jweston's post/advice is sound!

 

But let's look at some examples, because to be honest, I was surprised by the results!

I thought that in order to get a truss to rotate around its center, a new layer would have to be created for the anchor point.

But, after playing around with it more, I realize that at least for some truss this is possible without a new anchor layer!

 

Look at what happens when I rotate on the various layers/geometries of a truss. Pay particular attention to the item selected in the Scene Graph, the rotation value in the Properties Window, and the result of that rotation in the viewport. Also, notice the MVR UUID in the Properties Window. A non-null uuid signifies the "root" of the MVR object:

 

Screen Shot 2020-02-20 at 8.16.11 AM.pngScreen Shot 2020-02-20 at 8.16.00 AM.pngScreen Shot 2020-02-20 at 8.15.49 AM.png

 

 

Let's also quickly show that same example with a sphere:

Screen Shot 2020-02-20 at 8.19.23 AM.pngScreen Shot 2020-02-20 at 8.19.29 AM.pngScreen Shot 2020-02-20 at 8.19.41 AM.pngScreen Shot 2020-02-20 at 8.19.51 AM.png

 

 

Hopefully between this explanation and the various comments from our users about how they've solved this problem, it helps you out!

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