Posts Tagged ‘drafting’

Software Review – Renderworks 2011

Monday, October 25th, 2010

I have seen the new Cinema 4D rendering engine for Vectorworks mentioned in reviews as not much more than a bullet point. Yet the new rendering engine is leaps and bounds beyond what was previously called Renderworks that it is almost like a whole new piece of software and certainly deserving of an independent review. In fact, the system is now so robust that Nemetschek would do its customers a great service by adding a getting started guide just for Renderworks to go into better detail about the functionality of the system.

The new rendering engine is so much more powerful, in fact, that I ran into a few problems right off the bat. Nemetschek claims that their new engine is many times faster than the old one. Yet when I did a side by side Final Quality Renderworks test the new engine took much longer to produce its result. Curious I looked further into this and discovered that the actual image was much better quality and, in order to get a quality equivalent to the old FQR, I had to set everything in custom to “Low Quality” and turn off Ray Tracing. Then the engine was faster. In short, the only way to get a true apples to apples comparison is to put the new RW on its lowest settings and the old Renderworks on its highest settings.

What’s that Ray Tracing thing he mentioned?

That’s right, the new Renderworks adds Ray Tracing functionality, meaning you can set how many times an individual photon bounces off objects. This gives renderings a more natural quality as bounce light is included in the rendering of the final image. This does increase rendering time and can cause a simple scene to take a fair amount of time to render. But you definitely get what you pay for. A little more time for a much higher quality rendering is, in my opinion, worth the wait.

One of the first things I did with the new Renderworks was rerender my lighthouse drawing. Here is where I hit the first, and only real snag, in the new system. Because the rendering engine deals with light and textures in an entirely new manner, the old textures did not map properly. As such, I had to rebuild my textures from scratch. This will cause some users a bit of frustration during the initial upgrade, but the final results will be well worth it.


A side by side comparison of my rendering of the lighthouse in RW2010 and RW2011

As you can see from the above comparisons not only are the shadows softer and more true but the detail in the drafting is much clearer. I did not change any of the physical drafted objects for the rerender. Only lighting sources and textures were changed.

The new Renderworks allows the importation of HDR images from which lighting information can be extracted and used for lighting your 3D models. Several HDRIs are included with the basic RW package and the user can import their own as well. Not only can this be a quick way to mock up basic lighting conditions, it also allows for the creation of really nice looking white models.

Turning off Textures and Colors in the Custom RW palette and then turning off ambient light from the Lighting Options Palette, setting indirect lighting to one bounce and Environmental lighting to HDRI white can give results like this:


Whitemodel of my 3D drafting of a house built from shipping containers. HDRI Environmental lighting and one directional light source.

In addition to vastly improved lighting options, the texturing capabilities of Renderworks 2011 are significantly improved. While imports of older files will require a rebuild of the textures, the user should find this worth the effort. Not only are simple colored textures improved, but the bumpmapping is better as well. One thing that could use some improvement is the transparency function. I have yet to find a suitable combination of settings which give adequate results for something like a translucent fabric.

The ability to add Decals allows for greater dynamic range of rendering options as well. A decal is an image file placed on top of an object with another texture. This allows the user to put graffiti or a poster on a wall for example.

Emitter options allow the user to set a reference white color temperature for light emitting objects. This is useful in a number of ways, not the least of which is when creating a texture that emits light allowing one to approximate fluorescent tubes, video screens, or lit walls.

Along with the new and expanded tools in the lighting and texturing areas. The artistic Renderworks options are newly redesigned as well. Users who are familiar with the old functionality of the Artistic RW settings will need to adapt to the new system, but the options are robust and give interesting and useful options for rendering one’s drawings.

Obviously the new Renderworks Cinema 4D engine is primarily of interest to those users who draw in 3D regularly. However, given the improvements in the 3D drawing environment in Vectorworks 2011, I expect an increasing number of users to begin working in 3D and using the new rendering engine.


Quick 3D sketch with Background image and Decal. Background image courtesy SnaPsi

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An Adventure in Non-Standard Roof and Doors in Vectorworks

Monday, October 4th, 2010

I am in the midst of an interesting drafting project. A two story house built from 24′ shipping containers. The house is partly built. The containers are on stilts with several windows and doors cut out in various places. I am drafting the structure, as built, in 3D in order to begin work on the final design phase of finishing the interiors, designing roof decking, and other aspects to make this industrial structure into a functional live/work space. Last week I covered the walls and this week we will look at the roof and doors.

The roof presented an interesting challenge. While not corrugated like the walls, it does have quite a texture to it. 30 ovaloid ribs on the top give it a raised exterior and a raised interior. My intent with this drawing is to model every component accurately with regards to its real world geometry. This gives the benefit, over using texture based modeling, of having the interior design/remodel be as true to life in the model as possible.


The roof of a 24′ shipping container Rendered in Vectorworks 2011

Creating the roof geometry turned out to be a simple process once I wrapped my head around it. My first instinct was to make a rectangle 1/4″ thick and then 30 flat ovals 1″ thick and use the add surface tool. The problem with this, as was the issue with using wall recesses for the walls, is that it would leave the interior of the roofing flat when in reality the ribs create recessed areas inside.

The next solution proved to be the best one. I created the rectangle, as mentioned above, and then cut out holes the size of the base of the ribs. I then created 30 NURBS curves, the shape of the top of the ribs, 1″ above the rectangle. From there I used the loft tool to connect the now cut rectangle to the various NURBS. I now had the interior and exterior geometry modeled to give full texture. This way, should the ceiling be exposed in this, or a future remodel, the geometry and texture is built in to the piece and will not have to be redrawn.

The doors were complex in a different way than either the roof or the walls. While none of the elements were overly complicated on their own, there are simply a lot of them. The door itself is a double hung 4″ wide metal frame with corrugated metal panels inside the frame. Simple enough. The complexity came from the locking mechanism.


The doors of a 24′ shipping container Rendered in Vectorworks 2011

The locks are composed of two metal poles on each door with handles to rotate them. As they rotate, the hands on the top and bottom grab on and lock into the hands on the container frame itself. All of this was simple geometry, but again there were a lot of parts. Each handle was composed of several polygons, and the locking hands themselves were quite complicated shapes.

In addition to modeling all these interesting shapes, I had to make decisions about the degree of detail I was willing to go into. I wanted the locking mechanism themselves because that provides interesting possibilities when we get to determining paint colors on the exterior and choosing contrasting or complimentary colors for the locking system. But then there was the question of including hex bolts and other parts of the structure.

I made the decision, for now, to forgo that next level of detail. It will not impact design decisions or renderings. Should they prove to be useful later on I made the doors as symbols so it will simply be a matter of adjusting the symbol geometry in that one instance and the whole drawing gets updated.

One design idea is to remove one or more of the doors and replace it with a large glass wall. A quick replace symbol function will be a lot simpler if and when we reach that point in the process.

Now that the drafting is complete, I look forward to the design phase.

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An Adventure in Non-Standard Walls in Vectorworks

Monday, September 27th, 2010

I am in the midst of an interesting drafting project. A two story house built from shipping containers. The house is partly built. The containers are on stilts with several windows and doors cut out in various places. I am drafting the structure, as built, in 3D in order to begin work on the final design phase; finishing the interiors, designing roof decking, and other aspects to make this industrial structure into a functional live/work space.


A Matson Shipping container and my 3D model in OpenGL

The containers are 24′ Matson shipping containers, the kind you see on ships, trains, and trucks. They make for a nice building material as they are very structurally sound and can be stacked on top of one another several high. While they are a great construction material, they pose an interesting drafting problem. The walls, in order to provide for maximum structural integrity, are corrugated. This is easy enough to model in 3D; draw a polygon in the shape of the corrugation and extrude to the correct height. However, this solution does not allow for the use of plug-in objects like Doors and Windows.

For the parts of the structure that are already finished, it would be easy enough to cut a hole in the extrude and drop a window in place without recourse to the many features of plug-in objects. But for the walls that are as yet uncut, being able to quickly and easily play with the size and shape of windows and doors without recutting the extrude every time would make the design phase a lot more pleasurable. So I set out on my quest to solve this problem.


A view of the corrugated wall with a window as it is and as I want it to look in OpenGL

A grumble on Twitter was quickly answered by Kevin Lee Allen. His suggestion was to use the Convert Polyline to Object feature and turn my corrugated line into a wall. Sounds simple enough. Trouble is, the conversion created 212 walls, one starting at each corner of the corrugation. Because of this, plug-in objects were not behaving properly as they would not cut through all the walls they intersected with.

After trying a few more things on my own, including an exploration of wall styles, I emailed Jonathan Pickup. Jon offers a web based consulting service and within an hour of my email being sent was on a skype call with him showing me through a screen capture how to do wall recesses. By doing a wall recess I am able to draw a wall using the wall tool and give it the corrugated look that the containers have. We appeared good to go.

This process worked brilliantly save one small problem. While I could model one side of the wall perfectly, the other side remained flat. Numerous attempts to recess the other side of the wall resulted in various failures. I could get a wall that looked corrugated on both sides, but the thickness of the wall would have had to be twice what the shipping containers are in actuality. That solution would obviously lead to problems down the road as the design phase of the project moves to interiors.

There may be a setting or approach to the wall recess function that I am missing, but as of yet my best course of action appears to be a return to my original solution of using an extrude. This will allow me to get accurate internal and external dimensions. While it is possible that, once insulation and paneling are added to the interiors Jonathan’s wall recess solution would be best, my plan is to treat the insulation and panels as separate 3D objects (or walls) and cut holes in them where windows and doors are.

While this route is slightly more laborious on a per object basis it will allow for more accurate modeling of the building. The structural elements of the containers, specifically the vertical corner pieces, make any wall tool solution a little more complicated than a standard drafting project.

The roof of these containers provides its own interesting drafting challenges which I intend to cover next week.

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Design Software – Fall Preview

Monday, September 13th, 2010

As designers in the 21st century it is hard to imagine anything more fundamental to our work than the computer. The software we use to turn our ideas into designs is central to the work we do. Having played recently with Maya I have been thinking a lot about software and its role in design. While anyone with any degree of creativity is not bounded in that creativity by the tools they use, when you have the right tool for the job, the work becomes a lot easier and imagination is given freedom to roam unfettered.

There are some really exciting developments happening in the world of CAD this fall. The two of most interest to me are Vectorworks 2011 and AutoCAD for Mac. Vectorworks has long been a cross platform tool and the default drafting tool for theatrical lighting designers. AutoCAD has only ever played a minimal role with lighting designers and has been absent from the Mac since 1992.

Let’s start with Vectorworks. Information is a bit slim coming out of the company. What is known comes from a series of vague videos posted to their YouTube channel (Clip1, Clip2, Clip3). While the full range of of features remains unknown to the public, the direction they are moving in is very exciting.

The 3D environment looks to be vastly improved. The previously laborious 3D interface now appears to be a state of the art intuitive UI. Earlier versions of Vectorworks treated 3D space as an extension of 2D space. From their videos it appears that VW2011 3D space has been wholly redesigned as a native 3D environment. This is very good news.

Not only has the 3D working environment seen a massive upgrade, but the rendering engine is new as well. Renderworks is now based on Cinema 4D by Maxon Computers. This brings Vectorworks up to the cutting edge of 3D rendering technology. With the drafting precision we all love about Vectorworks and increasingly intuitive user interface combined with this massive upgrade to its rendering engine, Vectorworks is firmly taking a step towards being a competitive player in the 3D software world well beyond its conventional arenas of live entertainment, engineering, and architecture. I don’t know how popular the software is with game developers now, but I would imagine a substantial increase in that market with this release.

The next exciting development comes from Autodesk with their announcement of AutoCAD for Mac.

I have not used AutoCAD since it’s 2001 release when I was at San Francisco Opera. Having come from a Vectorworks background I found the logic behind the software a bit difficult to wrap my head around. Still firmly rooted in its early 1980′s command line mentality, AutoCAD 2001 was a very foreign language to me. The new software looks to be quite different. Being a new build of the program based on OSX from coverflow to a Mac style UI, the advances look to be very promising.

Not only does the visual layout of the UI look good (as a designer I want my working environment to reflect good aesthetic principals) but the 3D rendering engine looks beautiful.

I would honestly be surprised if AutoCAD made the developments necessary to really gain a foothold in the world of theatrical lighting. I will certainly keep my mind open to the possibility, but last I knew AutoCAD the difference between an AutoCAD block and a Vectorworks symbol were so far apart as to make them an ultimately useless comparison. Unless and until AutoCAD has an object type comparable in scope and functionality to the VW symbol it will never be a goto program for lighting designers.

All that said, it looks like a beautiful program for all other manner of draftsmen. In fact, I am waiting excitedly to get my hands on a copy of the software and see what they have done with it. AutoCAD for Mac looks to be very exciting indeed.

Providing a Mac platform for its software was not enough for Autodesk however. AutoCAD has also developed a line of mobile applications for devices like the iPad. This move will be wonderful for architects and other designers to share drawings and renderings with clients. Allowing the client an interactive experience rather than the static experience of a JPEG or PDF will be a boon to designers, engineers, and architects around the world.

It is an exciting time for software in the entertainment industry. Not only is the basic drafting technology improving at a rapid pace, but the 3D environments are becoming both common and easy to use. That ease of use will allow 3D to move from a nice to have to a need to have as both rendering and modeling time drops substantially.

All these new developments have me excited. What software are you looking forwards to?

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Lighting in Maya – Desperate Hours

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Last week I downloaded a 30 day trial copy of Maya to try my hand at some 3D modeling and lighting. Since my background is primarily in 2D drafting this was a whole new experience for me. While Vectorworks, my go to drafting program, has a very good 3D component, Maya is a completely different animal.

Maya does not have the precision of Vectorworks. It does not work in a particular scale and does not easily snap objects together. Everything is proportional, scalable, and most important, easily editable. What it lacks in precision it gains in intuitive UI design. The environment is really easy to learn to move around in and begin to manipulate objects. I worked my way through the getting started guide to become familiar with the various elements in the program and then set myself up with a project of my own.

Creating a fantasy world in Maya is easy. The drawing aspect of the program is about as intuitive as a pencil and paper. But I was particularly interested in seeing how the program would hold up as far as recreating realistic lighting conditions. So I took an image of my lighting from a show I did several years ago and began drawing the set and then lighting it. Below are the results.

A scene from Desperate Hours that I lit in 2008

My recreation in Maya

I downloaded the furniture, person, and gun. Everything else was drawn by me and all the textures I created within Maya. The lamp began as a downloaded object and then was manipulated by me to get it looking close to the one in the drawing. Having done some 3D modeling in Vectorworks I was familiar with the idea of textures and shaders, but had never encountered this program’s way of doing things or the tremendous amount of control it gives the user. Everything is a variable. As a designer, this fine level of control is wonderful.

While the basic drawing aspect is very straight forward, much of the rendering engine was tricky to figure out. The table lamp was challenge #1. Getting the right translucent look took a lot of work. Finding the balance between the light source inside the lampshade and the translucency of the lampshade itself took a lot of investigating. Since Maya gives you control over nearly every aspect of the physics of light it can be daunting for a novice like myself to decide where to begin. Does the light cast shadows? Does it “emit photons?” How many? What color is the light when it bounces off a surface? How much light does a given surface allow to bounce off of it? All of these and more are considerations one must deal with while lighting in a 3D environment.

Challenge #2 was the smoke. Maya creates smoke and haze effects by using what it calls nParticles. These are little spheres emitted from a point which have controllable qualities like color, radiance, opacity, speed, direction, and more. Varying these, and running an animation sequence, allows you to generate fairly realistic smoke effects.

While I clearly have a long way to go in terms of making this image look just like the reference picture, I am quite pleased at what I have been able to accomplish with a week to learn a new piece of software. The experience was quite a bit different than my last attempt at 3D modeling where I was already familiar with the basic software and was just adding complexity. I’ll be excited to see what else I can learn to do with the time remaining on my demo version of Maya.

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Product Review – Vectorworks 2010 Part 2: 3D Drafting and Basic Rendering

Monday, April 26th, 2010

As I said in Part 1 of my review, Vectorworks 2010 is a fantastic program for drafting lightplots. But there is much more to the program’s functionality than 2D lightplots. I finally had some downtime this past week to sit with Vectorworks 2010 and get to know it a little better. Up to now I had not gone very far into the functionality of the program and was using it as little more than the rather old version (V10.5) I had been working with prior.

I began working my way through the training manual that came with the program and was given a lot of basic exercises to learn different tools. Basic 3D extrudes, 3D reshaping, curves, and so forth. I was blithely working with these simple shapes when I came to the first big project in the training manual.

Draw a lighthouse.

Presented with an architectural drawing you are tasked with drafting and then rendering the object in 3D.

My first reaction was “there is no way in hell I can do that.” But after taking a second look at the drawing I realized it can be broken down into more or less basic shapes which can be dealt with on an individual level rather easily. Just as I break down the drafting of a lightplot into smaller manageable chunks, so too did this appear much easier once I took that route with the Lighthouse.

I have worked with Vectorworks for over a decade. In that time I have done very little architectural style drafting. From my background of drafting lightplots, the use of symbols became readily apparent as the way to make this project work. Much of the drawing would be composed of a few symbols that repeat and then a handful of sweeps and extrudes.

The most complex shape to deal with, far and away, was going to be the iron supports underneath the first landing. Not only is the basic outline a complex shape with various curves and corners, but it is cut out and recessed in multiple places at varying depths. This is also what makes for a very good learning project. There is a single, very difficult, challenge and then the rest of the project is working with rather basic skills in a more complex way than the previous simple shapes exercises.

My mindset going in to this work was that I was learning a whole new computer program. The upgrade from V10.5 to 2010 is huge and it was far better to treat my knowledge base as coming from a different program. That mindset served me well.

The Spotlight manual is written in a very clear and easy to read manner. I had done the short version of the manual when I first got the program and drafted a simple 3D theater with lighting positions. But that hardly gets at much of what is good with this program.

Wrapping my brain around 3D space took some effort, as did parsing what would be the best way to achieve a particular goal. Some shapes made more sense to create as sweeps while others were better suited to be extrudes along a path. While the manual does not tell you what is best, after some trial and error I began to get a sense of the, sometimes subtle, differences between the two modes of working. The roof and spire were clearly better suited to sweeps, while the floors for the various levels had a bit of a question to them. Should I continue the floor all the way to the center point, or create a circle and extrude along that path? Because this project had a lot of those situations and many circular shapes to work with, I got a lot of experience in determining when one would use one tool or another.

The manual is written clearly. Thus it should be no problem for a novice, or someone upgrading from a much older version like I was, to dive right into the program and begin to do some fun and interesting work.

A tool that was new to me, which I found radically useful on this project, was the snap lupe [Z]. It is not a tool that is very necessary for the drafting of lightplots, but for these more complex and detailed drawings it is an invaluable addition to the Vectorworks tool set.

The exercise itself did not cover renderworks textures or lighting renderings (topics that are covered later in the tutorial) but I was able to stumble my way through some elementary uses of these tools thanks, in no small part, to the clear and well designed user interface of the program.

After working through this next level of exercises I have to say that I would strongly encourage anyone with the means to do so (and I understand that the program is very pricey for many) to consider the upgrade to 2010. The functionality has vastly improved as has the UI.

Along with my Vectorworks upgrade in February, I had upgraded my laptop in January. Before the new laptop, doing any sort of 3D modeling was a bit of a hassle as the rendering time was tedious. While the file I worked with for this review was in no way huge, the faster processor certainly helped make the 3D work a pleasure. If you are planning on an upgrade and getting into the 3D modeling I would strongly encourage you to make sure your computer’s processor is up to speed, and upgrade as necessary. VW2010 is a powerful program, but it needs a strong computer to do that work.

Did you find this review useful? Would you like to see more reviews like this here?

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Product Review – Vectorworks 2010 Part 1: In the trenches

Friday, February 26th, 2010

I received my new copy of Vectorworks 2010 right in the midst of drafting several shows on top of one another. Never one to turn down a challenge, I installed the software, ported over my symbol libraries, downloaded my two main plug-ins (Autplot Tools for Spotlight and Beam Draw) and went to town. It took me an hour or so to rebuild my custom palettes, menus, and get used to the new placement of a few critical keyboard commands (must remember “H” is now the grabber tool). Once that was done I was ready to get to work.

Since at its core what I need Vectorworks for is to draft lightplots I figured the best test would be this plunge into the deep end of the pool. I plan to cover more of the functionality of this software in later parts to this review. As a basic drafting machine for the creation of lightplots Vectorworks 2010 is fantastic. I thought the process of my upgrade might be of interest to readers so I will begin there.

The first thing I noticed was the visual design. It is quite beautiful. The images for tools in the palettes are very clear and distinguishable as well as good looking. While non-essential to getting work done, it does make a big difference when you are staring at a computer screen for eight or ten hours a day. A small change around tools that I found incredibly useful was the fact the the program now remembers your last choice for tool options rather than returning to a program default every time you launch the software. For example, I often use the mirror tool to layout sidelight systems. The system default is mirror mode but I need mirror and duplicate. I can’t tell you the number of times I am racing to get a plot finished and forget to switch modes and then have to redo the work. It’s only a few seconds but it adds frustration to the process. Now that frustration is gone due to the program remembering my settings. Very nice.

The second thing about the visual design is the visual feedback the program gives specifically regarding instrument selection. Highlighting the objects and giving names and highlights to the area on an object as you pass over it is incredibly useful. While it took a little bit of time to get used to and be able to parse the visual language without it impeding workflow, I quickly became acclimated to it and very glad that it was there.

The basic Spotlight functionality is all there but no longer clustered in a single menu. As such I modified my standard lighting menu to include tools previously contained in the spotlight menu. These include convert to Symbol/Multicircuit, Assign Legend, Instrument Key, Refresh, and Number Instruments. In addition to the basic Spotlight functionality I used on these plots there looks to be quite a lot of additional material that I will be exploring in future posts.

The layout of the basic drafting window is very different from the version I was using before. All the class/layer menu information is still up top, but so too is the magnifying buttons and fit to page. While it took a little getting used to, the new layout is an improvement. Everything relating to visibility is in one place. Further, the addition of a classes/layers button is much improved over the older drop down menu item I previously had to contend with.

My biggest (and so far only) complaint is the changing of keyboard commands. While this is certainly something that can learned it is frustrating at the beginning. It should also be noted that Vectorworks keyboard commands are all fully customizable and editable(and I added back my align button). It just takes time. As I get deeper into the functionality of the program for later posts I will be approaching the software as though it were a wholly new technology for me as some of the changes are so massive that it might as well be.

I am looking forward to exploring the event planning suite of tools, new trussing, color/gobo libraries, and other new Spotlight tools as well.

As a drafting program to make a lightplot Vectorworks has maintained its edge as the industry standard setting the bar for what Computer Aided Design can do for the lighting and design community. I hope you’ll join me in future posts as I continue to explore this fantastic piece of software.

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The Style of Composition

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

“There are a million ways to skin a cat,” or so the saying goes.

I was thinking about this the other day in regards to visual style while in my studio designing a lightplot. I was thinking about it because as I was devising the lighting scheme I noticed that I was engaging in a somewhat new process. I don’t mean the steps I take to create a plot, but rather the inner creative journey.

At its most basic level there are three ways a three dimensional figure can be lit, from the back, from the side or from the front. These can be expanded upon ad nauseum as they are in various lighting methods but in the end those are the options. Light from above and light from below ultimately fall into one of these three categories while diagonals are at most a combination of two of these and ultimately do not function independently from the three core directions.

These three directions each serve a distinct and critical role in defining the form of a three dimensional object, specifically the human form.

Light from behind defines that object as distinct from its background and contextual surroundings. Body as existential entity.

backlight

Light from the sides defines the physical form itself. Body as sculptural object.

Crosslight

Light from the front defines the features. Body as emotional subject.

frontlight

Nearly every show I light has some version of these three elements. Depending upon the compositional needs of the piece one may be highlighted over another. Dance, for example, traditionally focuses on sidelighting while theater often focuses on frontlighting. But these traditional rules of thumb get broken to truly create art.

I used to hear designers say some version of “I always use such and such a color backlight” and would be fairly shocked every time I heard it. After all, isn’t every show unique and distinct from every other show?

Making what could be generic responses specific is what differentiates craft from art. Taking that one step further, it becomes important to have those “generic responses” be a function of the piece at hand rather than conforming the design of a particular piece to some platonic ideal of angle and color that does not approach the nuance of the specific work in front of you.

Sometimes that specificity is a function of the demands of the venue or the scenery or some other physical constraint. Other times the choice is wholly artistic. Some designers choose to fight the venue and make the space conform to what they have determined is necessary. Others use the space as a guide to figure out how light best moves in this particular voluminous space. Neither one is right or wrong, but which approach is taken determines so much about the final design, and often tells us much about the designer.

I like to challenge myself regularly by paying attention to ruts I fall into and questioning them. Sometimes it will be with color, so I try to use a new color or color combination on every show I do. Sometimes it will be with angles and how I build the sidelight or backlight systems. Sometimes it will be with the quality, whether the light is hard or soft or broken.

This recent plot I set up several different challenges. In every area in fact. And while I have no idea if the final outcome will look startlingly new or more of the same, the internal process of creating it was quite a ride. Do I really need sidelight? Why use that color? Should I light that directly or indirectly?

Having a style is a wonderful thing. But there is a risk that an effective style can soon become a rut. Without an engagement in the work and a critical eye to the creation, one can find themselves explaining how they “always do such and such.” Yet with the right degree of criticism, that “always” can become incredibly freeing.

Breaking light down to its most basic elements allows the designer to really focus on the compositional approach for the particular piece. It allows us to look at a show scene by scene and determine whether or not we need backlight, for example. If we do, what is that? Are we lighting the actors from behind with spotlights or lighting the scenery from the front? If a spotlight, is it from straight behind or diagonal? One big light or a bunch of smaller ones.

The options are at once simple and infinite. Even when talking about clear backlight, there are literally thousands if not millions of permutations as to what that actually means in practical terms. Straight back, angled, hard, dappled, direct, bounced, the list goes on. Clear might even be a general term to indicate very unsaturated colors, yet still for all intents and purposes be clear.

Thus it is possible to always use such and such a color backlight and yet never repeat the same choice over hundreds and hundreds of shows. There are, it seems, a million ways to hang a light.

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Preparatory Repertory

Monday, August 27th, 2007

I just sent out the lightplot for the two shows I am doing at the Barter Theatre next month. I had a fair bit of trouble with my two main programs to get that done. My drafting program was acting a little screwy and that alone was mildly disconcerting. In addition, my database program was having trouble with the import/export routines to Vectorworks.

The long and the short of it is that the whole process took a lot longer than anticipated, and I must now hope that no crucial information was lost in the translation.

It will be fun to be working in Virginia again. I am sure Abingdon will be quite a different experience than Norfolk but I really enjoy the south. Grits for breakfast. Oh I can hardly wait!

The lightplot was a curious puzzle to work out. SInce we are doing two shows in repertory the plot had to be able to work for both shows and at the same time be specific to each production. After all, Dracula and Driving Miss Daisy are about as different in style and tone as one can get.

One of the most obvious ways to transform the plot from one show to the next is by changing color. But at the same time there are more subtle textural nuances to the shows that can not be addressed simply through a color change. Different kinds of lights, angles, the use of shadow and pattern. How the different plays isolate areas or do not? What is the nature of darkness in these two plays? Is night blue or is night dark?

All these questions lead to various choices about the type placement and focus of the different lights, beyond the simple repertory fixtures. The details are where the differences are highlighted. Probably 80% of any play can lit with a standard repertory plot, perhaps allowing for changes in color. But the 20% that cannot is what makes a production truly stand out.

Working in repertory is always a bit of a compromise. Even in a situation like this where there are only two shows and I am designing both of them. Perhaps compromise is not the best term. Negotiation would be more appropriate.

A fun and exciting negotiation.

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Drafting Day

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

I have been drafting the lights for Windows for a good part of today and yesterday. I don’t think I have written much if anything about drafting here, but it is certainly no less important to the design process than anything else.

Since many of my readers are not lighting designers, I will take a moment to define relevant terms.

Drafting: consists of the technical drawings that lighting and scenic designers draw up to communicate the physical aspects of the design to the technicians. A lightplot gives very precise information to the electricians about what kind of lights go where, how they should be controlled by the lighting control system, how they are plugged in, what color they receive or any accessories, like color changers, patterns or iris.

Worksheets: The working drawings executed by a lighting designer to determine the precise angles of the lighting instruments. These show where the individual lights go and become organized as part of a whole lighting system. They are then translated into the lightplot.

I know a lot of designers who do not enjoy drafting or doing worksheets. They find it the tedious work that one does before the fun design work. As a result they often do not take enough time in this part of the process and often run into major problems once in the theatre. It is possible to have every move one makes in a theatre be determined prior to entering the building. This is important because time is of the essence. It is possible to work out on paper everything necessary to do the lighting designers work. The only surprises should come from errors, like scenery not built to the proper specifications.

I love doing worksheets. It is a wonderful negotiation with the scenery. It is a fun process of discovery in terms of how the light moves in this particular scenic world. Every good set contains within it the lighting. Much of the work of a lighting designer is to find the lighting inherent to the set that most effectively aids the storytelling of the play.

The set for Windows is fairly straight forward. Two scenic walls that bring some interesting angles into a generic rectilinear stage space. Upstage are a series of lightboxes. We are planning on using color as a major storytelling device and these lightboxes will be a key element to that aspect of the visual storytelling.

One of the major challenges to this design comes neither from the scenery nor from the complexity of the text. At least not at first. The lighting grid, as is the case all over New York, is very low, less than 12 feet from the stage floor. The irony of small, specifically short, spaces is that they require a lot more lighting instruments to illuminate the space than do larger spaces. One could conceivably light a warehouse or a spanish fortress with fewer lights than one needs for a small New York stage.

On top of this, the play has many locations and it flows in and out of memory, so even the same location might not be the same place. This necessitates a wide breadth in terms of the lighting palette. As a result, one must be rather precise with the drafting of the lights. And as precise as one is, there are sacrifices to be made. One must guess what the staging will be like and all one can do is hope the guess is correct.

Spending time on the drafting outside the theatre means more time can be spent in the theatre doing the composition. The fun work. Drafting the lights is like a painter laying out their palette. One chooses not only colors, but also if one will use oils or acrylics for the subject at hand. Is one using traditional brushes or perhaps a palette knife? Changes might happen mid process, but the lighting designer, like the painter, wants the majority of these decisions to be made prior to beginning the composition.

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