Hi Paul!

The best settings are depending on kind of objects, distance of the fixtures and how many you use, even color of filters and forms of gobos. So you have to adjust until you are happy. Note that you can use more than 100% to get the right balance on your simulation!

/Lasse Berg, Capture

Hi Lasse and Paul,

Please explain why 1600% is the maximum and not 100%. What´s the use of this?

Hi,

Well, why not? ;-)

On some fields there is virtually no upper limit. I guess with millions of percents of ambient lighting things will become so hot that everything melts, and with millions of percents of smoke the air will actually be oil..


Regards,
Lars Wernlund

Ok, let me ask this question another way!

I am sat at home at the moment and I want to pre-program some of my show.

I put a Generic Par64 and Par 16 at the same height from the floor pointing straight down.

The Par64 has a field lumen of 11000, the Par16 has a field lumen of 672.62.

At what percentages do I have to have the Fixture Lighting and Fixture Lighting differentation for this photo metric data to be correct in the simulation?

Thanks,

Paul

Hi Paul,

Good question. We don't know either.

The catch is that there is no hard relationsship between the lumen of the fixtures and the RGB values for the beams in order for anything to be "correct" - there are too many factors to ruin it, such as the brightness/contrast of your screen, rounding errors on the graphics card for low intensities and the color perception of your eyes.

A hint though; Fixture Lighting Differentiation is the slider that allows you to turn on and off this balancing (0% means all look the same and 100% is what we think is a balance value taking into account some average screen brightness/contrast settings) and Fixture Lighting is simply a grand master most commonly used to boost the brightness of long throw/low intensity projects.

Hope it helps, but as I wrote, there is no absolute answer.


Regards,
Lars Wernlund

Hi Paul, I detect a degree of frustration here. So let me try and help.

First there are 2 types of visualisation.

1) The static rendering used for commercial /architectural applications. This type uses accurate grids where each point is calculated from the photometric file for the fixture for each fixture. This requires quite "maths hungry" processing and can take from a few seconds to several minutes (even hours) for large complex lighting designs. Commercial programs like AGI 32 is an example of this where the calculated results should be within 2% of actual recorded light meter readings, as large multi-million dollar contracts can be signed on the backs of these results.

2). Then there are the "real time" rendering programs which can be applied to large numbers of lights that can change all their attributes in (virtually) real time. This by necessity has to be a compromise, if the maths is to be crunched in "real time" in most cases this is an "indication or what one could expect to see"

The point is, its an indication, not actual. I certainly would not place any of the real time visualisation programs in front of a client and say "this is exactly how it will look" what I do say "this will give you an idea of what to expect" and" wow" them with all the lights moving/changing etc.

To answer your points about Capture.

Think of it as proportional lighting design ( not actual). Whatever the % you set, all the fixtures will be "in proportion" your Par 16 will be about 6% of the intensity of the 1K so you have to adjust the background / light output smoke etc to get the effect you want. The program will not tell you if you have /have not enough light. As a LD you should be able to assess that by experience.

Hope this helps

cheers

Steve