2021 Moving light accessories

[MSLD]

I like the new accessory process for adding top hats, etc to conventional lights. It doesn't seem to work for moving lights. When I add a clamp or moving light claw, it places it at the front of the light. I can re-position it so it connects to the base, but when I focus the light, it moves to the front of the light.

How do we change the relationship?

[markdd]

Basically there are a couple of factors that need to be in place for Hook Clamps.

1. The Hook Clamp needs a Parts record attached with the Base field checked
2. It also needs a Light info record attached and the device field should be filled in with Static Accessory
3. The Hook Clamp symbol must have its insertion point at the point where the clamp wraps the barrel or truss chord

When you run the Accessory tool, what should happen is the Clamp is added to the insertion point of the lighting device and the lighting device geometry is displaced downwards by the depth of the clamp symbol from insertion point and below.

 

 

 

[MSLD]

I would have thought the clamps in the 2021 Library would already have that.

[markdd]

I know. Some of them do and some don't. Did you make it work?

[Gabriel Chan]

Just upgraded to 2021, and I'm looking at the new accessories function, in particular the clamps accessories (base parts) work flow.

 

I think I have wrapped my head around how the following works:

On 9/18/2020 at 3:33 PM, markdd said:

When you run the Accessory tool, what should happen is the Clamp is added to the insertion point of the lighting device and the lighting device geometry is displaced downwards by the depth of the clamp symbol from insertion point and below.

 

 

My question is what if the lighting symbols includes the rubber studs that moving lights usually sit on? 

 

If we look at the screen shot attached, we have on the left, a Clay Paky 800 Spot QWO and a K20 B-Eye on the right. Upon editing the left symbol, we will find that the base is a generic solid, and hence not editable (unless we do solid subtraction). Because the base has studs, when inserting clamps, the clamp symbol takes reference from the base of the studs as the attachment point, when in fact it should be taking reference from the base of the lighting fixture. The end result is that the clamp is floating and not physically attached to the fixture.

 

The right fixture does not have these studs so no issues with this.

 

There are quite a number of spotlight fixtures that comes shipped with Vectorworks that have these studs, and this seems quite counterintuitive if we had to manually edit away these studs for the clamps attachment to work. Has anybody come up with work arounds?

 

Gabriel

Spotlight Clamps.vwx