3D visualiser

The realtime 3D preview: beams, haze, shadows, exposure and camera.

A realtime 3D preview of the rig: real beam cones through haze, real shadows, real gobo projection, lit surfaces and lens flares. It runs off the same merged output the rig gets, so what it shows is what the lamps are doing.

VISUALISER ON
VISUALISER OFF

It opens as its own window. Fixtures need a position to appear at all - see 2D stage layout.

Camera

Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom. The camera frames itself on the rig when the viewer starts and does not re-frame afterwards, so patch and stage-size changes are best made before opening it (or reopen it after).

The room

VISUALISER WIDTH 12 DEPTH 8 HEIGHT 6
VISUALISER OBJECTS            # open the scene objects editor

Stage size is in metres, and stage coordinates start at a corner. See Scene objects for walls, furniture, people and props.

Look and exposure

Command	Range	What it does
`VISUALISER EXPOSURE <v>`	0.1–5.0	Overall exposure before tone-mapping
`VISUALISER GAMMA <v>`	0.1–5.0	Display gamma
`VISUALISER BLOOM <v>`	0.0–4.0	Glow bleed around bright areas
`VISUALISER AMBIENTLIGHT <v>`	0.0–1.0	Fill light, so an unlit room is not pitch black
`VISUALISER RESOLUTION <v>`	0.25–2.0	Render scale - the main performance dial

Beams

Command	Range	What it does
`VISUALISER BEAMBRIGHTNESS <v>`	0.1–24.0	Brightness of the beam in the air
`VISUALISER BEAMDENSITY <v>`	0.05–8.0	How much the air scatters
`VISUALISER BEAMANGLE <v>`	0–170	Fallback cone angle for fixtures with no zoom
`VISUALISER SPOTBRIGHTNESS <v>`	0.0–12.0	Brightness of the lit pool on surfaces
`VISUALISER ANGLEFLUX <v>`	0.1–1.6	How much narrowing the zoom concentrates the beam
`VISUALISER FALLOFFDISTANCE <v>`	0.1–30.0	Distance over which a beam fades out
`VISUALISER BEAM SIZE\|BRIGHTNESS\|DENSITY <v>`		Grouped form of the above
`VISUALISER LINES ON\|OFF`		Draw beam centre lines - useful for aiming

Beam edge softness and focus follow each fixture’s own focus attribute, so there is no separate softness setting. FOCUS, SPOTLIGHTSOFTNESS, BEAMEDGE and QUALITY are accepted for old showfiles and do nothing.

Pools

The light a lantern puts on a surface is not a flat disc. A fixture’s field angle is where its light has fallen to a tenth of its peak, so a pool is brightest in the middle and dims out to its edge - and the edge itself is a transition a percent or two wide, not a step.

VISUALISER POOL ON|OFF                  # the whole group
VISUALISER POOL FLATNESS <0.0-1.0>      # flat or peaked field
VISUALISER POOL SOURCE <0.1-60.0>       # lamp source size in mm

FLATNESS is the lamp-position adjustment on a real profile: low peaks the light into the middle of the pool, high spreads it flat and keeps the falloff in the outer third. This is the control for how strong the falloff looks - not FIELD, which sets where the pool’s edge sits. Every fixture shifts its own value from this one - a lantern with a gobo wheel runs nearer peaked, a wash flatter, and no two units are identical.

SOURCE is the size of the lamp’s arc or filament. A bigger source behind the same lens throws a wider penumbra, so this is what sets how crisp a hard-focused edge can get.

Each part of the pool takes its own amount from 0 (off) to 1 (full):

Command	What it does
`VISUALISER POOL FIELD <v>`	The falloff from centre to edge. At 0 the pool is flat.
`VISUALISER POOL PENUMBRA <v>`	Keeps a hard edge a transition rather than a step
`VISUALISER POOL FOCAL <v>`	Softens the edge away from the plane the gate images at, so a beam onto a rake or a wall is crisp where it crosses focus
`VISUALISER POOL FRINGE <v>`	Colour separation towards the edge - warm inside, cool outside - as each colour is imaged at a slightly different size. Invisible in the middle, strongest where the pool falls off. A single-source lantern shows only what its glass does; a multi-emitter LED head, whose dies sit apart in the array, shows several times more
`VISUALISER POOL NOISE <v>`	A few percent of unevenness per fixture, so identical units do not look identical
`VISUALISER POOL HALATION <v>`	A very faint halo just outside the edge, from scatter inside the lantern’s own optics

The total light in a pool is the same however these are set - they only move it around inside the pool - so a fixture never gets brighter or dimmer overall for changing them. Halation is not the same thing as BLOOM: bloom is the camera’s response to a bright picture, this is the lantern’s glass, and it is still there with bloom off.

Flares and glow

Command	Range	What it does
`VISUALISER FLARESIZE <v>`	0.1–4.0	Size of the star a lamp wears pointing at you
`VISUALISER FLAREBRIGHTNESS <v>`	0.0–16.0	Its brightness
`VISUALISER GLOWSIZE <v>`	0.5–20.0	Size of the lens glow
`VISUALISER GLOWBRIGHTNESS <v>`	0.0–1.0	Its brightness

Fixture bodies

Command	Range	What it does
`VISUALISER BODYBRIGHTNESS <v>`	0.0–1.0	How brightly a lantern’s own housing is painted

A fixture’s body is not lit by the rig - nothing in your show changes how it looks - so this is the only control over it. The default, 0.45, is about where a real matte-black lantern sits against a dark stage. Turn it up towards 1.0 to pick fixtures out while rigging and focusing; turn it down to keep the eye on the light rather than the hardware, and 0 hides the bodies altogether and leaves you the beams.

The shading across a body is unaffected at any setting, so the yoke, the head and the base still read as separate solids and a fixture still turns in the light as you pan it.

Haze

VISUALISER HAZE ON|OFF
VISUALISER HAZE DENSITY <0-1>
VISUALISER HAZE SCALE <0.02-2.0>      # size of the drifting structure
VISUALISER HAZE SPEED <0-5>           # how fast it drifts

Without haze there is nothing in the air for a beam to light, so beams are invisible and only the pools on surfaces show - exactly like a real room.

Shadows

VISUALISER SHADOWS ON|OFF

Each light gets one shadow tile fitted to its own beam cone, so sharpness tracks beam angle rather than where the lamp happens to hang, and it re-fits every frame as zoom and focus change.

Gobos

VISUALISER GOBOROTATION <degrees>

Gobos are projected properly, including rotation and indexing.

Focus

FOCUS 50

Focus moves the lens group, so it changes where the fixture’s gate images. It is sharpest in the middle of the channel and blurs in both directions from there - shutter cuts, the iris edge and gobo detail all soften, and a gobo stays plainly the same gobo, just softer.

It does not change the beam in the air and it does not change how much light the lantern throws: the pool grows slightly and its peak drops slightly as the light spreads over it. Either side of sharp carries a faint colour fringe on hard edges - warm one way, cool the other - which is what a real lens does.

A fixture with no focus channel is drawn with a soft edge and none of this applies to it.

Frost

FROST 255

Frost is drawn. Swing it in and the beam spreads, its edge goes soft and the gobo stops imaging - at full frost the pattern is gone and the pool is even, at the brightness the gobo was letting through. The pool dims as it grows, because the same light is spread over a wider cone.

A fixture whose frost channel carries several different frosts - the Robe range puts a light, a medium and a combined frost on one channel - shows the one you picked, so the light frost stays a light frost.

Frost is a slot channel, so it takes a raw value, not a percentage - the same as Gobos above. FROST 100 on a fixture whose frost runs the whole channel is well under half way in; FROST 255 is fully in. The programmer’s own Frost control shows you the fixture’s segments by name.

Iris

IRIS 32

The iris is drawn. Close it and the beam and its pool get smaller - but it clips rather than zooming. A gobo keeps the size it was projecting and the blades cut its outside off; the middle of the pool stays exactly as bright as it was, because the light you have stopped down is thrown away rather than concentrated. That is the difference between an iris and a zoom, and it is the difference you see on stage.

Stopped right down, a fixture throws a pencil beam and a small pool at its original brightness. Point one at the camera and its flare goes out as soon as you are outside the narrowed beam.

Like frost, the iris is a slot channel and takes a raw value. On a Rogue R3 Spot the whole aperture travel is DMX 0-63, so IRIS 63 is fully closed and anything above that is one of the fixture’s pulse effects - which are drawn open, because the blades sweep the whole travel across them and no still picture can show the pulsing.

How many lights are evaluated

CONFIG MAXLIGHTS 256

This is how many lights the viewer will shade surfaces with, up to 1024. The default is 256, and you are unlikely to need to touch it: what a rig actually spends is one light per colour zone rather than one per cell, so a 37-pixel wash showing a single colour costs one, and the cost of the ones that exist is paid only by the part of the screen their light actually falls on.

It used to be much tighter - a few hundred is a recent change. If you have notes or a showfile from an older version that turned this down, it can go back up.

CONFIG BLIND VISUALISER OFF|FULL|PROGRAMMER

Lets the local visualiser show what you are building in blind while the rig keeps playing the live look. Art-Net and sACN always send the real output regardless.

Performance

If it is slow, in order of effect: VISUALISER RESOLUTION, CONFIG MAXLIGHTS, VISUALISER SHADOWS OFF, then haze density. SHOW VISPERF prints the visualiser’s own frame timings, and SHOW PERFMON the engine’s.

Three things that look broken and are not

A fixture outside the walls. Stage coordinates start at a corner, so a negative X is genuinely outside the room.
A colour command that renders white. Generic library profiles declare white emitters, so RED 100 on one is white light. Use a real manufacturer profile.
An invisible beam. A fixture whose zoom reads 0 gets a 0.2° beam. Set a zoom, or set VISUALISER BEAMANGLE.

Remote viewing

CONFIG ARTNET VIEWER <ip>|OFF

sends the output to a visualiser on another machine.