The 3D stage

The 3D stage draws the rig as it hangs in the room, so you can plan a show at home and see what a clip looks like from the audience before you're in the venue. It shows what the stage shows: the show as it plays, the blind look in blind mode, and a preset you're trying out. It needs no output and no fixtures connected, and nothing about it reaches the lights.

The Visualize layout has it above the launch grid. To put one in a layout of your own, choose 3D stage in the layout editor.

Looking around

Drag to orbit, right-drag (or two fingers) to move sideways, and scroll or pinch to zoom. Front looks from the audience, Top from above and Side from the right.

Haze

Beams only show in haze, as in a real room. The Haze slider sets what's always in the air. A fogger in the rig adds to it while it runs, and that fades over a minute or so after it stops, so a fog cue can be judged too.

Real light

With Real light on, each fixture shows what it really puts out rather than the colors as programmed, so you can spot weak fixtures and weak colors before you're in the venue:

• Brightness between fixtures. Each fixture is drawn against the rig's typical one, from the lumens in its definition. Where a definition gives only the power the fixture draws, the lumens are estimated from it, so treat those as rough. A fixture with neither counts as typical. Four times the lumens looks about twice as bright, as it does to the eye.
• Color wheels. A slot lets through only part of the lamp's light: deep red and deep blue pass a small share, yellow and light colors most of it. What passes depends on the lamp too. Discharge lamps and cool white LEDs are short of deep red, so red on a wheel looks weaker than you might expect, as it does on stage. A tungsten lamp is the other way round.
• LED colors. A color mixed from LEDs shows the LEDs' own colors and brightness: an RGB fixture's red is about a quarter of its full white and its blue about a tenth, and amber, lime and white LEDs add their own.
• Hue and saturation. A light that mixes color by hue and saturation, like a soft panel, shows the color as programmed, since its own LEDs aren't known.

These come from rough models of lamps, filters and LEDs, so they show what to expect rather than measure it. Turn Real light off to see the show's colors as programmed. The choice is remembered on each computer or tablet.

When you choose a fixture type in Add fixtures, it says its lumens, or About … lm, from its power when they're estimated.

Beam width

A beam is as wide as the fixture's definition says, and a Zoom lane opens and closes it, so narrow is brighter and wide spreads out, in the air and on the floor. Open Fixture Library fixtures mostly state their lens. Where a definition doesn't, a moving head gets a 16° beam, a fixed fixture 40°, and a zoom runs from 10° to 45°.

Gobos, prisms and focus

Fixtures with these tools show them in the beam and where it lands, following the lanes in your clips:

• Gobo cuts its picture into the pool of light and shafts into the beam, and Gobo spin turns it. See Gobo pictures for where the pictures come from.
• Prism splits the beam as the fixture's prism does: into a ring of as many beams as it has facets, or a fan of them in a line for a linear prism, and two prisms together split each beam again, whether they share a channel or the second has its own on Prism 2. Prism spin and Prism 2 spin turn each prism's beams on their own. A prism the definition says nothing about is drawn as the usual three-facet one.
• Focus is sharp at one distance, from 2 m at 0 to 30 m at 1, so a beam blurs as it lands nearer or further than that, and a moving head can drift out of focus as it crosses the room.
• Frost softens the edge and the gobo and spreads the beam a little.
• Iris closes the beam down to a fifth of its width.

Gobo pictures

Many Open Fixture Library fixtures name their gobos, and those are drawn from pictures that come with the app. The app's own fixture types that came from manufacturers' files use simple drawings of ours that resemble each gobo: the same kind of shape or texture, not the manufacturer's artwork. A gobo with no known picture gets a stand-in pattern, which shows when the gobo changes and how it moves, but not what it will look like.

To give a gobo its real picture, select a fixture in the Rig layout and open Gobos. Click a gobo and choose an image, such as one cropped from the fixture's manual. It's cropped to a square, and light passes where it's bright, so Invert swaps light and dark if the picture is drawn the other way round. × goes back to what the gobo had before.

The pictures belong to the fixture type, in the fixture library rather than the show, so every fixture of that type and every show gets them. Editing has to be unlocked to change them.

Getting the rig right

The picture is as good as the rig's measurements. In the layout, select fixtures to set their height, mounting and facing, and Lean for fixtures without pan and tilt. A fixture hangs at 4 m pointing straight down until you say otherwise.

The room

Room in the Rig layout panel's tools puts a venue around the rig. Add a room sizes one to clear the rig, and Fit to rig does it again later. Set its Width, Depth and Height in meters, and X and Y to place it on the plan. Stage depth and Stage height add a stage deck along the back wall, the end the rig's plan starts from. Trusses are straight runs between two points on the plan, at a height. All of it shows on the plan too, and it's saved with the show.

On the 3D stage, light stops at the first surface it meets and lands there: the floor, the stage deck's top or front, the walls or the ceiling. The room is kept dark so that the light stands out, and a wall or the ceiling turns to just its outline while you're behind it, so you can always see in. Without a room, the rig stands on an open floor.

Fixtures have their own position and height: a truss or deck doesn't carry them, but dragging one to it puts it there.

Strobe

A strobing fixture flashes on the stage, here and on the 2D stage, as often as the Strobe lane asks: once a second at the slow end to twenty times at the fast end. A fixture whose definition says how fast its strobe goes flashes at that rate, up to as fast as it can; for one that doesn't say, the stage's rate is a guide. Each fixture with its own strobe flashes on its own, as real strobes do, and one faster than the screen redraws flickers every other picture.

What it doesn't show yet

• A beam lands on one surface, so a pool reaching round a corner is cut off there.
• Surfaces don't throw shadows, and light doesn't bounce off them.
• Every prism's beams lean out by the same few degrees, whatever its glass, and a third prism channel follows Prism 2.
• A strobe whose definition doesn't say how fast it flashes is drawn at the rate asked for, which may not be what it does, and a strobe the engine makes by flashing the light is only as quick as the stage's frames.
• Real light uses typical LEDs, lamps and filters, not each fixture's measured ones, and UV is only a violet stand-in.