Theatre Lighting Design Software Free
2021年2月26日Download here: http://gg.gg/ogild
Cats and owls are able to see in the dark and are able to thrive without much need for light. Us humans, on the other hand, aren’t equipped with such convenient abilities. Instead, we are gifted with the ability to think about, design and invent our own sources of light.Related:
Stage Lighting Design Cad Software is a collection reguarding useful softwares for the planning of lighting shows. You can find both free softwares or free libraries for Autocad and paid softwares that allow you to design, simulate, plot, draft projects on paper. SoftPlot is a CAD application specifically for lighting. Plot lighting, manage paperwork for all levels of entertainment from theatre to film to TV and is great for students and professionals! SoftPlot is a graphical design tool that makes it easy to drag-and-drop lighting fixtures, trusses, and other elements on the design surface. Evaluate our Software for free! Download it, load the demo project and watch the lightshow in our 3D viewer. SweetLight makes stage design lighting fun and easy, and is available for download on your Windows or MacOS computer. download free, software for Microsoft Windows (and now some for Mac OSX and Linux) to control theatrical lighting. Some of this software is Open Source so it includes source code that allows you to modify it. My software works with the following DMX interface hardware (some.
To do such things, we need the help of a few tools that will allow us to utilize this ability to its utmost potential. We need to know where to place these lights we create and how to power them. With the use of the software below and an electrical plan software, you can do the same.Free Theatre Lighting Design Software DownloadDIALuxLITESTAR 4DLighting Reality PROLight the Way
Knowing where to place your lights is a key method too help economize electricity and resources. Knowing how much light, as well, is important to achieve the right, comfortable atmosphere that people can be productive in. Too much light, though, is detrimental and here are the reasons why.
*More Light, More Heat. Less Light, Less HeatLight and heat come hand-in-hand. It’s no shocker then that placing more lights will increase the room’s temperature without a shadow of a doubt.
*Light Up Your BillOf course having more lights will make your electric bill shoot up, there’s just no way around it; after all, what will you use to power your lights if not electricity?
*A Blinding FlashWhen you have a lot of things that reflect light in your house or office, you will find flashes and glares extremely irritating and painful. The wrong intensity of light can hurt or even blind, including those reflecting or glaring off reflecting surfaces such as mirrors.
Don’t think that just using your eyes is enough to make the best of things, be smart and use the tools that are available to you like lighting design and electrical CAD software.VisionVisual 2016 For WindowsLitePro DLX For MacBest Lighting Design Products For AndroidReluxNet – Most Popular SoftwareShed Light on the Matter
With the disadvantages of too much light being clear, what about the advantages of having just enough light and where to place them? Knowing where to place them and knowing the right lights to use will have a whole host of advantages that can’t be denied.
*A Soothing LightHaving the right level of luminosity can lead to making things easier on the eyes, especially when the color of the walls and the decor match.
*Under the SpotlightYou can direct attention to something or away from something by using a spotlight or by hiding something in the dark. People tend to gravitate towards what they can see rather than what they can’t.
*Bright without PlightBy placing lights of the right intensity in the right place, you can light up your entire office or home without the problem of hurting the eyes or your wallet. Positioning and the right tool for the right job is key.
When you want to keep everything well lit, you need to know how it would look like should you place the light there without actually placing it there yet. This is where this software comes in and, if you’re interested in it, you may also want to look at our electrical design software list.Related Posts
With an updated article on a popular topic at On Stage Lighting, we look at stage lighting design software and CAD options when it comes to planning and communication in our lighting world in an extended Guide To Choosing Stage Lighting Design Software. You might also be interested to know that through Learn@OnStageLighting we teach CAD for production lighting.Uses Of Software In Lighting Design
Whilst being no stranger to scribbling a lighting plan on the back of a tour schedule with a biro (usually as the first few rigging boxes are coming out of the truck), you may want to present your ideas and technical information in a clear and more professional way. As the complexity of the design increases so does the number of people involved in making it all happen and the consequences of a planning or communication mistake. If you have ever swapped out more than 150 Source Four Par lenses from a massive 20” box truss trimmed at a height of 7m because the LD should have specified ‘wides’, then you’ll know the cost of shoddy calculations.
Using a computer to help the lighting design process has many advantages over traditional hand drawn lighting plans and manually collated data methods. These range from A for Accuracy all the way to Z for, well, Z: The 3rd dimension in 3D CAD modelling (a useful part of getting those calculations, angles and distances right). There are also great possibilities in digital storage and collaboration, reuse of previous hard work and just generally getting a computer to take the donkey work of repetition or maths when planning lighting design and system.
The pitfalls to using software in lighting design are similar to the use of computers for any other purpose. The dangers of digital file storage, crashes or file compatibility are familiar to most in the modern world, along with the steep learning curve required to be able to work as effectively using the software as with paper and pencil. Even in an age of seemingly “free everything”, the cost of owning and updating specialist CAD software must be a consideration, particularly with the most comprehensive packages. We will also look at some software with extremely specific uses with which the cost of ownership must be weighed against the amount of actual use for a given user.
This article will refer to this use of digital software tools as CAD in the “Computer Aided Design” sense, as not all the tools available to us a lighting designers are used for drafting. It will consider specialist stage lighting software, and also look at more generic applications that can be used for parts of the design process.What Do We Need From The Software?
Different users require different functionality from their lighting software along with things that are important or workflow areas that have to be easier than others. Let’s look some possible requirements:
*Drawing and presenting lighting plans (or light plots, if you are in the US)
*Creation and sharing of lists such as equipment inventories, gel cuttings lists, cable allocations etc. (a relevant US term would be Shop Orders)
*Noting of data and, as important, changes such as cue lists, focus notes, equipment shortages.
*Calculation and communication including power requirements, circuit information, weight loadings.
*Lighting Designer tools such as beam angle calculation and experimentation, design choices such as gobos (templates/patterns)
*3D lighting visualisation and presentation of CGI virtual lighting design
*Pre-programming of data into a lighting console using visualisation software
You may notice that, while a few requirements are planning tools simply for the Lighting Designer, the majority of items in the above list centre around communication with others. If you are going to be designing a show, owning and preparing the equipment, rigging it and operating the lighting system in isolation you could get away with nothing more than a few Post-It notes and making it up on the day. Even this would assume that you didn’t have to agree with the Sound department where their speakers would go or show the riggers where to put your points before you arrive.
Putting on shows is nearly always a collaborative effort, and successful collaboration comes from effective communication.Lighting Design Software And Collaboration
It’s a good time to look at collaboration in lighting software, as ‘cloud computing’ is becoming a buzzword throughout a wider world than simply the early adopters. Before we even consider ‘software as a service’ in specialist stage lighting applications, we might reflect on the benefits of digital file sharing that doesn’t involved pinging emails backwards and forwards and wondering if you have the latest version or can even open it. Using services such as Dropbox, our stage lighting partners can easily work on the same files in a single place and always have access to the latest version of the lighting plan or the equipment inventory. For a while now, I’ve been a huge fan of Google Docs (now generically called Google Apps) which not only allows for such file sharing but also puts the software functions of word processing and spreadsheet firmly in ‘the cloud’.
The collaborative possibilities of this kind of workflow are currently changing the way many of us work in all walks of a life and lighting design communication is no exception. Being able to work directly in a cloud based spreadsheet while the Production Electrician is also accessing the latest version is the kind of real time collaboration that makes Google Apps great for me. I must add that as a web publisher that is against monopolies and market domination I have plenty of issues with Google as a whole, but currently still find myself at the mercy of the free crack that is Google Apps (with Gmail etc.) :(
Providers of stage lighting design software are moving into thecloud computing space and functionality that puts the emphasis on the collaborative nature of stage lighting planning. By way of example, Vectorworks (the base production of the Spotlight lighting design software) has specific cloud services and John McKernon’s Lightwright was always designed with a portion of it given over to the concept of different ‘users’ and tracking changes, not just presenting the current state of play.
While Lightwright has some great lighting design specific tools and a huge amount of thought has gone into it, such a collaborative concept can be also be found generically in a shared Google spreadsheet. Different stakeholders have access at different levels, changes can be made and are and can be reverted to. All in real time and for free in the case of Google Docs, if you are prepared to put in the time create your own. Perhaps in the future On Stage Lighting will do a series of tutorials on using Google Docs in lighting design.The Cost Of Software In Lighting Design
Or “The Benefits of Being Born Free”
When considering the choices of stage lighting design software for any or all of the above requirements, the issue of cost forces one to ask some tough questions. While there are a range of software options ranging from free to mega-expensive, some of those questions might be:
*How much of my time do I spend using ‘x’ function?
*Do I get paid directly for doing ‘y’?
*How much time ( = revenue, opportunity cost etc.) will I save if I start using ‘z’?
*Do I just fancy a piece of fancy software to mess about with?
An answer of “yes” to the last question is a perfectly valid one, but one that should be answered truthfully.
Stage lighting design software can be extremely expensive to own and in my experience the most comprehensive (read:expensive) does often not fall into the “good buy” category for your average independent Lighting Designer based on the economics. Also, there is a temptation to think that being able to use, even better, own such shiny software makes you more employable and even a better LD! This is not the case. While being able to use CAD is a useful skill it does not make you a Lighting Designer, better or otherwise.
As a freelance LD making your own way, running the latest version of the fanciest software is a lovely overhead eating into your profit unless it can be financially proven that you are actually more productive or your client experience is so improved that it keeps you ahead in the game. Or at least stops you falling behind.
Perhaps it’s already becoming obvious why in the world of fast turnaround events, the biro/tour schedule system of communication is often favoured. No one, not the client, not the ad agency, not the production company, nobody, is going to pay for anything. Why would they when the show will happen with or without all those beautifully crafted drawings and lists? Why bother when it doesn’t matter to them how awkward your workflow is, so long as the show opens? Not all that many Directors / Clients / Mums know a good lighting design from an average one. In the end, they certainly can’t tell if your design has been lovingly wrought in layers of vector-based beauty from the most expensive Bezier curves money can buy. Or if you drew it in chalk on the floor. The show either looks good and the minimum number of creatives had a crying fit. Or not.
At the concept or pitch stage, there is an case for an expensive computer-generated finish, but we’ll discuss that later.
There is also an argument for you making your own life more bearable or enjoyable with the use of dedicated lighting software, but this should not be confused with an actual business case. In order to even need to be more productive with fancy software, you need to have a whole lot of relevant lighting gigs in a year.Stage Lighting Design Software Free
All this means that you should seriously look at the free / cheap end of the lighting software market first and consider all the information below before making that big purchase.
However, with the need for collaborative communication, professional outputs in your field and cost in mind, let’s plough on.2D Plan Drawing Software
To generate simple schematics and two-dimensional lighting design layouts so that your crew can rig and set up correctly is the minimum software requirement by any Lighting Designer. The ability to cleanly draw a lighting plan, print it out or email it.
You can actually draw a lighting plan using MS Word if you need to (I’ve seen it done!) but life is too short for bad drawing with a word processing software when you could be producing bad drawings in a more suitable package. Whether the application uses the ‘CAD’ title or not, the key thing we’ll need is something ‘vector’ based. Vector drawing uses mathematical equations to create lines, curves and solids which means they are accurate, completely scalable and resulting drawings or details are disconnected from screen or print resolutions. Layout of 2D lighting symbols based in ‘raster’ format (bitmaps, basically images) on a plan without accurate dimensional information isn’t ideal and really only a digital version of our scribbled biro drawing.
Any mainstream vector drawing software will produce a nice lighting plan with annotations showing colours, circuits and focus information. If you are already familiar with Adobe products, we are looking at Illustrator rather than Photoshop, and there are plenty of vector titles available including free software. The downside to using a non-lighting specific CAD packages for the production of 2D lighting plants is their lack of scaled stage lighting symbols to drag and drop into your plan and the immediate availability of other stage lighting data such as manufacturer details or specific calculations etc.
The difference between vector based graphics software and dedicated CAD products is only really the presentation of the tools, in particular dimensional and other data entry and reporting. The difference between generic CAD software that might be used by architects or engineers and stage lighting specific drawing packages is again the presentation of the tools, with developers putting what the lighting designer needs front and centre. Professional CAD software generally has the functionality that we could shape for our needs, stage lighting design drawing packages have just already shaped them and put them into toolbars with names that we recognise.
Then there is collaboration and integration with other systems such as being able to use existing venue plans or add stage lighting data to a drawing from another CAD software. Any drawing software that can cope with the AutoCAD standard .DWG and .DXF formats is a must when working alongside others with similar capability, for when you don’t all use the same CAD software. The ability to import these formats can be used with lighting symbols that are available from equipment manufacturers but it is vital to watch out for scaling errors when importing symbols this way. In fact, when working with imported vector data such as .DWG and .DXF drawings, watch out for scaling errors in general! Such errors have the power to make grown men weep into wireless ergonomic keyboards.
The most dedicated lighting design drawing software packages can save you the trouble of importing loads of different lighting symbols by shipping with their own fixture library. They also usually come with with the ability to generate some useful lists such as fixture quantities and gel cuts based on data attached to the symbols. The level of complexity or functionality is, unsurprisingly, related to software cost when these functions are built into a thing with “CAD” in the title.
Choice: If you need to draw 2D plans and are on a budget, get the extra usefulness of one of the free or cheaper lighting design software or basic generic CAD packages . Don’t mess about with raster based image software or something totally unsuitable like Powerpoint. There are free / cheap options that are better suited, some of which are listed below. Ideally find something that will be able to deal with the .DWG files that are thrown at you unless you are going to be simply producing neat lighting plans for others to follow with minimal external input.Lighting Design, Draw and Specify
What if you want to do more than draw a 2D lighting plan? What about all those lists, calculations and the communication of technical information in other formats other than a CAD drawing.
Using MS Word as our example, you can use Word (or Open Office, Works, whatever) to create neat a list and store it in digital format. What you don’t get from a simple word processed list is the benefit of good quality spreadsheet functions. For this reason, many lighting designer’s have made good use of Excel and other spreadsheet software for many years to deal with equipment totals, cable, accessories an
https://diarynote.indered.space
Cats and owls are able to see in the dark and are able to thrive without much need for light. Us humans, on the other hand, aren’t equipped with such convenient abilities. Instead, we are gifted with the ability to think about, design and invent our own sources of light.Related:
Stage Lighting Design Cad Software is a collection reguarding useful softwares for the planning of lighting shows. You can find both free softwares or free libraries for Autocad and paid softwares that allow you to design, simulate, plot, draft projects on paper. SoftPlot is a CAD application specifically for lighting. Plot lighting, manage paperwork for all levels of entertainment from theatre to film to TV and is great for students and professionals! SoftPlot is a graphical design tool that makes it easy to drag-and-drop lighting fixtures, trusses, and other elements on the design surface. Evaluate our Software for free! Download it, load the demo project and watch the lightshow in our 3D viewer. SweetLight makes stage design lighting fun and easy, and is available for download on your Windows or MacOS computer. download free, software for Microsoft Windows (and now some for Mac OSX and Linux) to control theatrical lighting. Some of this software is Open Source so it includes source code that allows you to modify it. My software works with the following DMX interface hardware (some.
To do such things, we need the help of a few tools that will allow us to utilize this ability to its utmost potential. We need to know where to place these lights we create and how to power them. With the use of the software below and an electrical plan software, you can do the same.Free Theatre Lighting Design Software DownloadDIALuxLITESTAR 4DLighting Reality PROLight the Way
Knowing where to place your lights is a key method too help economize electricity and resources. Knowing how much light, as well, is important to achieve the right, comfortable atmosphere that people can be productive in. Too much light, though, is detrimental and here are the reasons why.
*More Light, More Heat. Less Light, Less HeatLight and heat come hand-in-hand. It’s no shocker then that placing more lights will increase the room’s temperature without a shadow of a doubt.
*Light Up Your BillOf course having more lights will make your electric bill shoot up, there’s just no way around it; after all, what will you use to power your lights if not electricity?
*A Blinding FlashWhen you have a lot of things that reflect light in your house or office, you will find flashes and glares extremely irritating and painful. The wrong intensity of light can hurt or even blind, including those reflecting or glaring off reflecting surfaces such as mirrors.
Don’t think that just using your eyes is enough to make the best of things, be smart and use the tools that are available to you like lighting design and electrical CAD software.VisionVisual 2016 For WindowsLitePro DLX For MacBest Lighting Design Products For AndroidReluxNet – Most Popular SoftwareShed Light on the Matter
With the disadvantages of too much light being clear, what about the advantages of having just enough light and where to place them? Knowing where to place them and knowing the right lights to use will have a whole host of advantages that can’t be denied.
*A Soothing LightHaving the right level of luminosity can lead to making things easier on the eyes, especially when the color of the walls and the decor match.
*Under the SpotlightYou can direct attention to something or away from something by using a spotlight or by hiding something in the dark. People tend to gravitate towards what they can see rather than what they can’t.
*Bright without PlightBy placing lights of the right intensity in the right place, you can light up your entire office or home without the problem of hurting the eyes or your wallet. Positioning and the right tool for the right job is key.
When you want to keep everything well lit, you need to know how it would look like should you place the light there without actually placing it there yet. This is where this software comes in and, if you’re interested in it, you may also want to look at our electrical design software list.Related Posts
With an updated article on a popular topic at On Stage Lighting, we look at stage lighting design software and CAD options when it comes to planning and communication in our lighting world in an extended Guide To Choosing Stage Lighting Design Software. You might also be interested to know that through Learn@OnStageLighting we teach CAD for production lighting.Uses Of Software In Lighting Design
Whilst being no stranger to scribbling a lighting plan on the back of a tour schedule with a biro (usually as the first few rigging boxes are coming out of the truck), you may want to present your ideas and technical information in a clear and more professional way. As the complexity of the design increases so does the number of people involved in making it all happen and the consequences of a planning or communication mistake. If you have ever swapped out more than 150 Source Four Par lenses from a massive 20” box truss trimmed at a height of 7m because the LD should have specified ‘wides’, then you’ll know the cost of shoddy calculations.
Using a computer to help the lighting design process has many advantages over traditional hand drawn lighting plans and manually collated data methods. These range from A for Accuracy all the way to Z for, well, Z: The 3rd dimension in 3D CAD modelling (a useful part of getting those calculations, angles and distances right). There are also great possibilities in digital storage and collaboration, reuse of previous hard work and just generally getting a computer to take the donkey work of repetition or maths when planning lighting design and system.
The pitfalls to using software in lighting design are similar to the use of computers for any other purpose. The dangers of digital file storage, crashes or file compatibility are familiar to most in the modern world, along with the steep learning curve required to be able to work as effectively using the software as with paper and pencil. Even in an age of seemingly “free everything”, the cost of owning and updating specialist CAD software must be a consideration, particularly with the most comprehensive packages. We will also look at some software with extremely specific uses with which the cost of ownership must be weighed against the amount of actual use for a given user.
This article will refer to this use of digital software tools as CAD in the “Computer Aided Design” sense, as not all the tools available to us a lighting designers are used for drafting. It will consider specialist stage lighting software, and also look at more generic applications that can be used for parts of the design process.What Do We Need From The Software?
Different users require different functionality from their lighting software along with things that are important or workflow areas that have to be easier than others. Let’s look some possible requirements:
*Drawing and presenting lighting plans (or light plots, if you are in the US)
*Creation and sharing of lists such as equipment inventories, gel cuttings lists, cable allocations etc. (a relevant US term would be Shop Orders)
*Noting of data and, as important, changes such as cue lists, focus notes, equipment shortages.
*Calculation and communication including power requirements, circuit information, weight loadings.
*Lighting Designer tools such as beam angle calculation and experimentation, design choices such as gobos (templates/patterns)
*3D lighting visualisation and presentation of CGI virtual lighting design
*Pre-programming of data into a lighting console using visualisation software
You may notice that, while a few requirements are planning tools simply for the Lighting Designer, the majority of items in the above list centre around communication with others. If you are going to be designing a show, owning and preparing the equipment, rigging it and operating the lighting system in isolation you could get away with nothing more than a few Post-It notes and making it up on the day. Even this would assume that you didn’t have to agree with the Sound department where their speakers would go or show the riggers where to put your points before you arrive.
Putting on shows is nearly always a collaborative effort, and successful collaboration comes from effective communication.Lighting Design Software And Collaboration
It’s a good time to look at collaboration in lighting software, as ‘cloud computing’ is becoming a buzzword throughout a wider world than simply the early adopters. Before we even consider ‘software as a service’ in specialist stage lighting applications, we might reflect on the benefits of digital file sharing that doesn’t involved pinging emails backwards and forwards and wondering if you have the latest version or can even open it. Using services such as Dropbox, our stage lighting partners can easily work on the same files in a single place and always have access to the latest version of the lighting plan or the equipment inventory. For a while now, I’ve been a huge fan of Google Docs (now generically called Google Apps) which not only allows for such file sharing but also puts the software functions of word processing and spreadsheet firmly in ‘the cloud’.
The collaborative possibilities of this kind of workflow are currently changing the way many of us work in all walks of a life and lighting design communication is no exception. Being able to work directly in a cloud based spreadsheet while the Production Electrician is also accessing the latest version is the kind of real time collaboration that makes Google Apps great for me. I must add that as a web publisher that is against monopolies and market domination I have plenty of issues with Google as a whole, but currently still find myself at the mercy of the free crack that is Google Apps (with Gmail etc.) :(
Providers of stage lighting design software are moving into thecloud computing space and functionality that puts the emphasis on the collaborative nature of stage lighting planning. By way of example, Vectorworks (the base production of the Spotlight lighting design software) has specific cloud services and John McKernon’s Lightwright was always designed with a portion of it given over to the concept of different ‘users’ and tracking changes, not just presenting the current state of play.
While Lightwright has some great lighting design specific tools and a huge amount of thought has gone into it, such a collaborative concept can be also be found generically in a shared Google spreadsheet. Different stakeholders have access at different levels, changes can be made and are and can be reverted to. All in real time and for free in the case of Google Docs, if you are prepared to put in the time create your own. Perhaps in the future On Stage Lighting will do a series of tutorials on using Google Docs in lighting design.The Cost Of Software In Lighting Design
Or “The Benefits of Being Born Free”
When considering the choices of stage lighting design software for any or all of the above requirements, the issue of cost forces one to ask some tough questions. While there are a range of software options ranging from free to mega-expensive, some of those questions might be:
*How much of my time do I spend using ‘x’ function?
*Do I get paid directly for doing ‘y’?
*How much time ( = revenue, opportunity cost etc.) will I save if I start using ‘z’?
*Do I just fancy a piece of fancy software to mess about with?
An answer of “yes” to the last question is a perfectly valid one, but one that should be answered truthfully.
Stage lighting design software can be extremely expensive to own and in my experience the most comprehensive (read:expensive) does often not fall into the “good buy” category for your average independent Lighting Designer based on the economics. Also, there is a temptation to think that being able to use, even better, own such shiny software makes you more employable and even a better LD! This is not the case. While being able to use CAD is a useful skill it does not make you a Lighting Designer, better or otherwise.
As a freelance LD making your own way, running the latest version of the fanciest software is a lovely overhead eating into your profit unless it can be financially proven that you are actually more productive or your client experience is so improved that it keeps you ahead in the game. Or at least stops you falling behind.
Perhaps it’s already becoming obvious why in the world of fast turnaround events, the biro/tour schedule system of communication is often favoured. No one, not the client, not the ad agency, not the production company, nobody, is going to pay for anything. Why would they when the show will happen with or without all those beautifully crafted drawings and lists? Why bother when it doesn’t matter to them how awkward your workflow is, so long as the show opens? Not all that many Directors / Clients / Mums know a good lighting design from an average one. In the end, they certainly can’t tell if your design has been lovingly wrought in layers of vector-based beauty from the most expensive Bezier curves money can buy. Or if you drew it in chalk on the floor. The show either looks good and the minimum number of creatives had a crying fit. Or not.
At the concept or pitch stage, there is an case for an expensive computer-generated finish, but we’ll discuss that later.
There is also an argument for you making your own life more bearable or enjoyable with the use of dedicated lighting software, but this should not be confused with an actual business case. In order to even need to be more productive with fancy software, you need to have a whole lot of relevant lighting gigs in a year.Stage Lighting Design Software Free
All this means that you should seriously look at the free / cheap end of the lighting software market first and consider all the information below before making that big purchase.
However, with the need for collaborative communication, professional outputs in your field and cost in mind, let’s plough on.2D Plan Drawing Software
To generate simple schematics and two-dimensional lighting design layouts so that your crew can rig and set up correctly is the minimum software requirement by any Lighting Designer. The ability to cleanly draw a lighting plan, print it out or email it.
You can actually draw a lighting plan using MS Word if you need to (I’ve seen it done!) but life is too short for bad drawing with a word processing software when you could be producing bad drawings in a more suitable package. Whether the application uses the ‘CAD’ title or not, the key thing we’ll need is something ‘vector’ based. Vector drawing uses mathematical equations to create lines, curves and solids which means they are accurate, completely scalable and resulting drawings or details are disconnected from screen or print resolutions. Layout of 2D lighting symbols based in ‘raster’ format (bitmaps, basically images) on a plan without accurate dimensional information isn’t ideal and really only a digital version of our scribbled biro drawing.
Any mainstream vector drawing software will produce a nice lighting plan with annotations showing colours, circuits and focus information. If you are already familiar with Adobe products, we are looking at Illustrator rather than Photoshop, and there are plenty of vector titles available including free software. The downside to using a non-lighting specific CAD packages for the production of 2D lighting plants is their lack of scaled stage lighting symbols to drag and drop into your plan and the immediate availability of other stage lighting data such as manufacturer details or specific calculations etc.
The difference between vector based graphics software and dedicated CAD products is only really the presentation of the tools, in particular dimensional and other data entry and reporting. The difference between generic CAD software that might be used by architects or engineers and stage lighting specific drawing packages is again the presentation of the tools, with developers putting what the lighting designer needs front and centre. Professional CAD software generally has the functionality that we could shape for our needs, stage lighting design drawing packages have just already shaped them and put them into toolbars with names that we recognise.
Then there is collaboration and integration with other systems such as being able to use existing venue plans or add stage lighting data to a drawing from another CAD software. Any drawing software that can cope with the AutoCAD standard .DWG and .DXF formats is a must when working alongside others with similar capability, for when you don’t all use the same CAD software. The ability to import these formats can be used with lighting symbols that are available from equipment manufacturers but it is vital to watch out for scaling errors when importing symbols this way. In fact, when working with imported vector data such as .DWG and .DXF drawings, watch out for scaling errors in general! Such errors have the power to make grown men weep into wireless ergonomic keyboards.
The most dedicated lighting design drawing software packages can save you the trouble of importing loads of different lighting symbols by shipping with their own fixture library. They also usually come with with the ability to generate some useful lists such as fixture quantities and gel cuts based on data attached to the symbols. The level of complexity or functionality is, unsurprisingly, related to software cost when these functions are built into a thing with “CAD” in the title.
Choice: If you need to draw 2D plans and are on a budget, get the extra usefulness of one of the free or cheaper lighting design software or basic generic CAD packages . Don’t mess about with raster based image software or something totally unsuitable like Powerpoint. There are free / cheap options that are better suited, some of which are listed below. Ideally find something that will be able to deal with the .DWG files that are thrown at you unless you are going to be simply producing neat lighting plans for others to follow with minimal external input.Lighting Design, Draw and Specify
What if you want to do more than draw a 2D lighting plan? What about all those lists, calculations and the communication of technical information in other formats other than a CAD drawing.
Using MS Word as our example, you can use Word (or Open Office, Works, whatever) to create neat a list and store it in digital format. What you don’t get from a simple word processed list is the benefit of good quality spreadsheet functions. For this reason, many lighting designer’s have made good use of Excel and other spreadsheet software for many years to deal with equipment totals, cable, accessories an
https://diarynote.indered.space
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