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Several capture questions/requests
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J. Musselman
New Member
Posts: New Member

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2012-08-20 01:45
    To the Capture Staff,

    I've been working on a rendering of Pink Floyd's 'Division Bell' tour stage (as everyone's seen I'm sure) to familiarize myself better with the Capture package, and have a few questions:

    1) When attempting to draw curved triangle truss with 2 sides longer than the 3rd, it draws at an odd angle. If you draw a strait piece, it's fine.

    2. I'm having difficulty drawing the curved stage deck. It needs to match a defined radius(quite large), but not extend beyond maybe 6m depth. Anything I try ..(ovality, cutaway, etc) doesn't seem to work. I have the radius and angle, now I need a more precise function get the 'chord' of the circle.

    3. Motion control and rotation... Is there some sort of tutorial on this? I saw the Kenesis video , and that was neat, but I don't have that. If you're familiar with the concert, there's a large circular screen truss that sits on the floor the first half, the tilts up, rises, and moves forward at the beginning of the 2nd half.

    4. I somewhat have the 'shell' over the arch done using a cylinder hull, but it seems to come to a 'point' on the top. The bottom to top heights apparently need to change with some sort of trigonometry (sine or cosine maybe).

    5. How would I put in the rear curved wall?

    6. Would the Capture upgrade that allows dwg import solve some of these? If so , please email me an upgrade quote.

    That's all for now... I'm sure I'll have more. Learning a lot ! Great product!

    Lars Wernlund
    Staff Member
    Posts:2016 Staff Member

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    2012-08-25 10:10
    Hi J,

    Here are some answers..

    1) I'm afraid I'm not following you here.

    2) In these situations, you need to subdivide and break the surface up into parts. For instance, one piece of cylinder in the front for the "apron" and then a box for the square surface behind it.

    3) No tutorial here I'm afraid. You want to insert a DMX Mover or Rotator, give it a good name, then select the objects you want to have moved by it and 'connect' them by setting their "Motion Fixture" property. You can then control the Mover/Rotator as any fixture or by patching it to DMX.

    4-5) Kind of the same answer as 3). I have put together a sample file where I've tried to illustrate how it could be done which you can download here.

    6) I can't provide you with a quite - I can only refer you to your web shop or a reseller. Upgrades are available at the price difference between the packages in question!

    Technical Director
    Capture Visualisation AB

    J. Musselman
    New Member
    Posts: New Member

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    2012-08-27 18:20
    Thanks for the reply! That clears up a few things...

    Regarding triangle truss.. when I curve a piece of truss that has 2 sides longer than the third (i.e. 1m high x .5m wide)
    If you look at it from the end (section view), it curves to the side....which is OK for a circle of truss that hangs horizontal overhead. I need it to curve up, so the apex of the truss is on top. I could send a copy of my file if that would help.

    But now I have some more questions after spending a lot of time this weekend with Capture...

    For DMX movers/rotators... can you have both a mover and a rotator attached to the same object?

    Is it possible to turn an individual layer's visibility on and off in CAD view? This would sure be handy on busy drawings...similar to Autocad.

    On many objects properties there is a 'Asymmetric' field listed. What is that for?

    A great addition to the Objects-Stages library would be scaffolding, circular (full and partial) and triangular stage decks.

    When moving or rotating objects, it would be convenient to use cursor keys for finer movements.

    And finally, is it possible to change the default 'black' background (space?) color?

    Thanks again..great product!

    Lars Wernlund
    Staff Member
    Posts:2016 Staff Member

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    2012-08-31 08:06
    Hi,

    Allright, I follow you now regarding the truss. You are right - this is currently unsupported in Capture. We are in the process of gathering a longer list of unsupported truss pieces and I will make sure this is included if it isn't already.

    You can use both rotators and movers, but you need to 'chain' them - ie. attach a rotator to the truss and the rotator to a mover. This is in fact quite important because Rotator -> Mover -> Object and Mover -> Rotator -> Object creates quite different results.

    The way to work with Layers in Capture is with the use of 'Layer Sets'. These are presets of which layers are on and off and it is a central concept used in more places (such as reports and plots). Drag and drop a layer set into a view to activate it - when you edit the layer set after that you will see it take effect 'live'. Having different layer sets in different views is also powerful.

    Regarding the 'asymmetric' field - the best thing is to try it! It is difficult to explain in words. =)

    Scaffolding & cursor keys - this is on our todo-list.

    The black background of the visualization cannot be changed - it is fixed by necessity in order for the lighting rendering to work properly.
    Technical Director
    Capture Visualisation AB
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