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craig

Simple Things All Moving Lights Should Do

For those who don’t know, one of the things I do for fun and profit is review moving lights for an industry rag, PLSN. This job has given me the opportunity to put my hands on quite a few intelligent lights, and I’ve found some common things that manufacturers do – or don’t – that I think are errors. Here’s a list of the five biggest mistakes that entertainment lighting fixture manufacturers make when designing new lights. Not having data / power pass throughs / not using PowerCON TRUE1 Obviously, some lights do not have pass-throughs because the amount of amperage that they draw would not allow more than one of that type to be placed on a circuit. I… Read More »Simple Things All Moving Lights Should Do

Hidden line rendering hacks with Vectorworks

Vectorworks is my primary stage modeling tool for tours and any other work that I do, but I agree with the consensus (a consensus I firmly and un-scientifically believe in) that Vectorworks is a huge, extremely sophisticated and often very-badly-behaved piece of bloatware. It does what I want it to do, but it does so in ways that are un-intuitive, extremely slow, and frustratingly inconsistent. For instance, select a fixture symbol that you’ve dropped onto a design layer, and you can do all the things you’d expect to be able to do: move the symbol around, rotate it, etc. Make that same symbol a “fixture”, however, and suddenly, using the rotation tool no longer works. You can rotate it only… Read More »Hidden line rendering hacks with Vectorworks