Stage lighting plug-in

Is there an extension for SketchUp/Layout that could help create a stage lighting plot. I’ve seen people post similar questions in the past and they are misunderstood by those who answer. I’m not looking for a rendering tool to improve the lights in the model for a more realistic render. I’m looking for symbols/blocks of stage lighting equipment that could be inserted into a model to generate the 2D paperwork lighting designers need to create a design. Right now VectorWorks Spotlight is the only software that does this well, but VW is an extremely expensive program that a lot of theater designers continue to buy because of this one tool set. I think there would be a lot of interest in this extension if it existed or if it were developed.

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SketchUp Pro comes with the Advanced Camera Tools extension that can help in film and stage design.

http://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/advanced-camera-tools

I am not familiar with what this 2D paperwork is, however SketchUp Pro has a built-in Report Generator that can produce reports (equipment lists) from the components that are placed in the model.

A search of the 3D Warehouse will find some components for staging, stage lights and lighting components.


Other than this, a search of the Extension Warehouse and SketchUcation PluginStore does not really find anything specific to stage lighting:

http://extensions.sketchup.com/en/search/site/stage

Thanks Dan,
Yeah, that’s what I thought. What we need is the ability to select a symbol (component, I guess) of a particular type of stage light and insert it into a document. We might have a hundred or more lights, of 6 or 7 types. We’d need to then generate a list of the lights and their positions on a spreadsheet along with info that would be attached to the light-like the color of the gel media, its focus, etc. I’m thinking its beyond SketchUp’s capabilities but I thought it was worth asking. I’ll look into the report Generator. There may be something there.
Sean

Yeah, the generate report can only count. Thanks, though.
Sean

Trust me, I know exactly what you are looking for. To my knowledge there is not a Spotlight or Litewrite equivalent plug-in that can handle outputting instrument scheduals, channel/dimmer/circuit/address, all the good stuff into a handy Hook-Up sheet that you can hand to an ME. There are some construction inventory plug-ins that work with components to generate excel-like lists of objects and attributes that perhaps you could bend to your will, but it would be serous work to set up I suspect, and still be a bit clunky.

Making the plot is certainly doable from a stock set of lights, many of which are available on the warehouse. If you set the camera to parallel projection and the view to overhead then you have an effective 2d plot too. Gather the lights you want into a component collection on your home drive then you can grab them form your list and drop them in wherever you want. Set the view to wireframe or monochrome to get a simplified “plot” look.

This is no problem for SketchUp. You can interactively insert light components using the Components Browser panel, either from the online 3D Warehouse or a local collection of lighting components (on your computer of LAN.)

See the online SketchUp User guide.

Again built-in to SketchUp Pro using the Report Generator, can list X, Y, Z positions.

Custom Dynamic Component attributes can be added to components for “Media Color”, “Focus” etc., that will appear in the attribute select box for the generator, so that they can appear on the reports.

There are also 3rd party extension that can create custom reports. (It is not that hard to learn to write a custom report generator in Ruby, and there are examples available.)

Spreadsheet: The built-in Report Generator has a “Download” button that saves as a local CSV file which can be imported into any spreadsheet application.

Again, some 3rd party “take-off” extensions for PC can even open MS Excel (using OLE) and dynamically push data into a worksheet.

INCORRECT !

Dynamic Components User Guide

Well this is interesting. I’m able to make a DC and create the fields that I need but I can’t make them unique to instances of the component. Applying component options makes those fields change for all the components.
What we need is to create a master component for a particular kind of lighting instrument–say Floodlight. And another for Spotlight, and a third for bare bulb–just to keep it simple. Then select and insert a floodlight into the model. Using the component options, I would then say that light will have its color=RED and its plug #=12 and where its pointing=stage edge. Then insert a 2nd floodlight next to it but this time the Color wants to be blue, its getting plugged into plug #15 and its going to be pointed at the middle of the stage. And then do this 20 or 30 times also mixing in spotlights and bare bulbs as well.
Then generate a spread sheet where each instance is listed on the spreadsheet with each of those unique values displayed.
Maybe this will work but I’ve got a lot more reading to do.
Thanks for the links.

:: OFF TOPIC ::

@seanoskea I see in your profile that you cite using SU2018Pro, AFAIK this has yet to be released, is this a typo, if not, where did you download it from?

Sorry 17. The latest version. I updated earlier this week and as everything else I use seems to be 6 months ahead I jut assumed it was 18.

There is a specific forum category for Dynamic Components, and in that category is a wiki-links thread that I created for help in learning and finding information about DCs.

You should peruse and search that category, and probably repost your previous post there along with attaching one of your problem components. Then a DC guru can look at what you attempted and find the issue.

SketchUp comes with folders “Components Sampler” and “Dynamic Components Training” of example components. There is an example “Car Sedan” component that will change color (using the DC Interact tool.) Check that one out for ideas.


In regard to scripts for collecting attribute information, a search on the developer categories:

https://forums.sketchup.com/search?q=attribute%20report%20category%3A12

See post :

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Yes, Mike came thru with a direct example to this scenario!

Also see his example at the bottom of that thread on how to generate a report for stage lighting, and then use the CSV file to create a table in LayOut.

Good job Mike.

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