Hi There John! I have a couple of questions. I have done an almost total redraw of my theatre and have two questions. The first, you mentioned that my two pillars where “inside out”. Is there a way to fix this or is it only fixed through redrawing the object. My main set of walls is blue and I fear they are not right. Second, is there a tutorial somewhere that talks about the walls with different opacity settings i.e., transparent from outside and opaque from inside.
To change the pillars, just highlight all faces, R-click and Reverse faces.
Similarly for your walls.
You don’t need to redraw them (at least, not for that reason).
I got the idea for one-way transparent walls from a post somewhere, not a tutorial. Sorry, it was several years ago, and I have idea now where I saw it.
Hello all
Im a theater LD from Denmark, where SU is extremely popular with our set designers, and also what is currently taught at the National school of performing arts. I would say that I recieve 70% of all drawings in SU, 10% by hand and 20% by VW or Ilustrator. I love the “3d for everyone” aproach, and I often do a lot of editing to the files I get, or draw construction drawings for any steel or woodwork i need for my light designs.
My current employer has provided me with a VW license + RenderWorks. But eventhough I have had several courses and 2 years expierience with it, I absolutely loath VW from the bottom of my heart. Its buggy, its unnesessary amounts of “Clicks”, but above all else its EXTREMELY slow (and im even using a high end GPU).
I wanted to switch to SU for all my LD needs, since I like to stay in the same workspace as my Set designer. I rarely do much rendering (priviously did a bit i WYG), so mostly im interested in doing a readable plot for my crew and being able to check angles, and spread degrees.
Anyone got any advise on extensions or got any DC that you use often? how could you produce a nice 2d plot with label legends for fixtures
Do you have Sketchup Make or Sketchup Pro? The Pro version comes with a nifty companion program called Layout. Its function is to produce nice 2d plots (and drawings) that can be labeled, dimensioned, and annotated. I am a set designer and use it all the time to present my drawings to the shop and carpenters.
I have LO, and I love using it. But I find it a bit hard doing annotation for each light fixture, each with at least 3 different attributes. And the text annotation dosn´t always follow along, if I move the fixture in the reference file and update. I was hoping for some sort of template label legend, and a quick way to input data to it.
another problem is that to make it more readable I like the fixture layer to be displayed on top of everything else, even though its Z height is obviously below its hang point. This could be circumvented by moving the fixtures up before exporting to LO
I know that SU isn´t a proper lightplot tool like WYSIWYG or VW spotlight. I know im bending the bounds of the vanilla program to fit my needs. I just wanted to know what other users (especially theatrical designers of all sorts) are doing and how they implement DC and extensions into their workflow
You can also create a scene with only the fixtures showing and, in LayOut, put a viewport with that scene on top of a similar view with all the other things. This removes the need to actually move things to get the view you need
I’m a production carpenter that tours with a large ballet company with really old/new and massive and small sets. I’ve been systematically drawing and cataloging each show in 3D. I use Keyframe Animation to show how some more complicated and larger sets come together. I use a screen recorder and format the video so it’s easy to share with my crew in which they’re able to show the animations thru their phones to the hired locals. This tool is great when working with a language barrier or refresh our memory on what worked best in assembly.