Skip to content

craig

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

IATSE and Stagehands Unions: A Complicated Relationship With Our Industry

[Update: the original form of this essay lumped all of IATSE into “stagehands unions”, when in fact there are many local chapters of IATSE that do not function as stagehands for touring concert productions, such as Local 728 in Hollywood that works on film and television lighting. I was under the misconception that IATSE was only stagehands, and that is incorrect. So, when I speak of the IA in this post, I mean only IATSE stagehands unions, and ones that work in arenas and theaters that cater to touring musical productions.] By even posting this, I’m signing myself up for hate mail. What I hope happens is that someone engages me on the issues and on my specific gripes, instead of just… Read More »IATSE and Stagehands Unions: A Complicated Relationship With Our Industry