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doomed

We are doomed.

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

The Case of the Mysterious Hippo Server

A few weeks ago I had the misfortune to have a Green Hippo media server sent to me for a show by a well-known company that provides gear such as this. The misfortune was not so much that I got a Hippotizer, because they’re excellent media servers that I’ve worked with before – but this particular server (or more accurately the software on it) was a giant lemon. There are really four separate issues here, and all were solved in different ways. I’ll take them one by one. The first problem began when I was first telling the server to fade the layers up and down. What we (the video designer and I) noticed was that the fade-up was happening…sort… Read More »The Case of the Mysterious Hippo Server