A special installment of the Weekly WYSIWYG posts - I posted an article yesterday about Marcus Wuebker’s lighting design and programming for the McNamara Tunnel in Detroit’s Airport.  I just got an email from Gil Densham from Cast Lighting - that contained the renderings from the project, which was done in WYSIWYG!  Thanks Gil!  Check these out:

One of the WYSIWYG features that I find the most helpful (with regards to WYSIWYG as a lighting design package) is the ability to print pipe tapes.  For those of you who have no idea what the heck I am talking about, a Pipe Tape is basically a very long piece of paper or webbing that has instrument hang information on it - placement, channel, dimmer, circuit, where it plugs into a mult, etc.  These tapes are very quickly hung onto a pipe and provide the electricians with a fast reference to get the show up and ready for each lighting location.

I have WYSIWYG Perform, and besides the ability to design and program my entire rig in the comfort of my own office, I can also print these tapes to minimize the load-in time for the production.

I talked to a number of people - old friends, new friends, people who read the blog - at LDI this year about WYSIWYG.  A bunch of people asked me why I made a switch from the AutoCAD environment to WYSIWYG in its entirety.  My only response was that I need something that will minimize my time spent behind the computer and maximize my time spent actually designing.  That’s what WYSIWYG does for me.  I still use AutoCAD on a regular basis for all kinds of tasks, but I am able to saw through a plot in about a third of the time I can in AutoCAD.

I got to chat with Gil Densham this year at LDI, and he walked me through the integration of the Black Box concept, as well as showed me a bunch of new live beam simulation tools that will be present in R23.  Niscon had a booth set up right next door, and they were demoing the actual Black Box setup, in real time.  Amazing.

Check out the pics, and check out the post on Black Box.  Be amazed.

Cast Lighting has a great feature among its PR capabilities - it allows users to post renderings of their work to the Cast Lighting website for showcasing purposes.  Among these showcases are the genres of Theatre, Television production, Concert production, Corporate design, and an “Other Projects” category, which has some interesting works.  Take a minute and check these out - see why those of us who use WYSIWYG do so!

Imagine a world in which a device existed that could coordinate all worlds of production (INCLUDING AUDIO), not control mind you, but coordinate - communication between gear and systems, systems helping out systems, and systems watching out for other systems to help systems do their respective jobs.

Now imagine a world where a device like this is in R+D, and a working model already exists.

Cast is developing Black Box - a project between several companies that is going to revolutionize our industry and our markets.  I’ve talked with Gil Densham a few times now, and I finally had a chance at LDI to see the Black Box in action.  Cast is shooting for a fully capable production model in September of 2009 (don’t hold me or Cast to that date, as the universe is the universe).  There are several companies that are teaming up to get this thing a kickin’, and everything depends on the coordinated efforts.  Patience, young camper, patience.

Gil explained Black Box to me with a very simple couple of scenarios - let me list one now.  Scenario 1, a moving screen.  Imagine a projection screen on a motor system that moves the projector around the stage, and a director who wants that screen to do different stuff every night.  There is an image being projected on that screen, and as the screen movess, the image needs to be constantly updated with reference to keystoning.  That image on the screen might also come in contact with some moving lights as it moves.  What happens when all of this stuff happens?  Anyone who’s programmed a DL-1 or DL-2 knows that this would be some pretty incredible progrtamming to do this live every night - how do you correct all of the keystoning on the fly?  How do you douse the moving lights that cross the screen’s path?  This is where the Black Box concept comes in.

From Cast’s press release about the Black Box concept:

BlackBox is built with special hardware and proprietary software to be an all-in-one, bi-directional high-speed communications nerve centre which enables all control devices to instruct or receive instructions from each other. Live, realtime input in all forms is received by the BlackBox, which acts as the brains - running an ultra high-speed hybrid version of wysiwyg that works with a special new wysiwyg file version (that CAST is working on now). BlackBox receives and converts live positional data about any or many moving objects, selected or deselected for tracking as required from one or several sources, applies its brain power and speed to establish the exact 3D positions of those objects, then computes instructions in XYZ, yar, pitch and roll terms, and then shoots out moving positional information to whatever control devices need it. So moving lights, set pieces, cameras etc. are synchronized and tracking the action of those moving objects - all in live realtime, all in true 3D.

These are exciting times, kids.  Exciting times.  More on Black Box to come.

Do you know what “attenuation” means with regards to light?  Attenuation is how fast the intensity of a light source’s light decreases with distance from objects.  In WYSIWYG R23, beam attenuation is going to be present in the live beam simulation mode.  Calculating the decay of the intensity of light over distance in shaded view is a major milestone for Cast, and for us that use WYSIWYG.

Check out these two examples.  The first with beam attenuation off, and the second with beam attenuation on.

Beam Attenuation OFF:

Beam Attenuation ON:

Since I’ll be at LDI this yeart, I’ll be reporting on all of the new WYSIWYG news, including information on the upcoming major project, “Blackbox.”

Ok, so for this week’s WYSIWYG post, I wanted to share a little up-and-coming information on the next release of WYSIWYG, R23.  There are some amazing things coming up in the new release of the software, and they are some of the exact items that many of us have requested over the years.

I had a great long conversation with Gil Densham this week on the phone about the stuff coming up - if I may say so myself, there are some amazing new technologies coming out soon, and others in heavy hardcore development.  There will be posts about these in the future - what was astonishing from my conversation with Gil this week was how involved Cast Lighting is in the process, and how they’ve pioneered and made important solving some of the challenges that our creative brains have created in the advent of new technology.

This week, I want to start chronicling the new additions to the R23 build of WYSIWYG.  For a long time there has been desire to have live control and output in the Live Beam Visualizer of optical focus - gobos on surfaces, shafts of light through the air from a breakup gobo exhibiting a hard and soft appearance when being run through an effect, etc.  R23 has this in the bag, and this is extremely exciting!  Imagine being able to exhibit a nice slightly over-focused pattern wash on a wall or piece of scenery, or show a client a focus effect across a truss.  It’s coming.  Check out the image below:

This image shows a template being projected onto a sphere in the foreground, and spilling onto a wall in the background.  New to R23 will be the ability to control the focus as it hits two distant surfaces and render it realtime.  Well, kiss my grits.  Check out the other side of the focus below, sharp on the sphere and out of focus on the wall:

Amazing.  Have a great weekend, everyone!

I’m going to be presenting a weekly post on Cast Software’s WYSIWYG lighting design program.  I’m a full-time user, and I’m going to write a weekly article on every aspect of the program I can write about, including the rendering engine, user interface, pre-viz awesomeness, and other aspects of it that make it a great tool.

If you have user experiences, tips and tricks, renderings, or problems you’d like answered, please email them to me and I’ll address them as best as I can.

We all have our choices in drafting software, and there’s three main platforms out there with several smaller companies making programs.  What’s your poison?  I’m a WYSIWYG man myself, with AutoCAD being my goto 3D platform..  But I also know Vectorworks too.  So - what do you use?  Post in the comments, I’d love to hear your preferences.  Also, if you draft by hand (and many do) tell us!

So, I’ve been doing a lot of pre-visualization stuff lately, and I wanted to take a moment and post some of my results.  Stay tuned, there’s a post about WYSIWYG by Cast Lighting coming soon.