Venue Sites Help and Tips

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Venue Sites Help and Tips

Postby jaykoller » Mon Apr 11, 2016 4:34 pm

I want to try and use venue sites for an upcoming event for the first time. The documentation seems a little limited as far as getting objects into the system. I was hoping to cut out a lot of trial and error.

Can someone please share best practices, tips or tricks for venue sites? I would like to start with a Vectorworks drawing and export the items I have. How should I do this? Object at time, entire drawing? Does scale matter, etc. How do I maximize performance?

Thanks for your help!

Jay
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Re: Venue Sites Help and Tips

Postby Sam Kriemelmeyer » Mon Dec 11, 2017 3:36 pm

Hey there Jay!

The main issue with Vectorworks is that it is crap for UV mapping. This is how we have objects WITH textures in PB. So I've been able to successfully implement Vectorworks drawings using the following steps...

Export selected or all from Vector works as .3DS and then bring into your PB project. When you do this PB will give you a couple of options, one of which is scale. I had to scale my object down .001 in order for it to be a decent size comparably to a camera viewport workspace (16 units).

From here you will need to recreate the screen surfaces only. I use Blender because it is free, easy, and there is lots of support online. This will allow you to UV map and export .3DS files per OUTPUT of PB. Bring these files into the PB project and then register the objects where they go on top of the Vectorworks set .3DS file.

In the Venue Site you should have a layer dedicated to the "background set" and a bunch of layers dedicated to the screen surfaces. These will be Output Routed to the appropriate servers in the device tree.

One other note. In the camera's inpector you can now choose "Layer Position related to Camera" under the "Determine layer render order by:" drop down. This will help if you do "fly throughs" so that objects don't fight with Z. In the end you may export another file from Vectorworks sans screen surfaces only so there is no chance of this "Z fighting". You are essentially using the first file only to register the placement of the Blender screen surface .3DS files.

Hope this helps, it has been working swimmingly for me! :mrgreen:
Sam Kriemelmeyer
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