Wysiwyg R36
Paz Warsager
I'm a freelance Lighting Designer working mainly in opera and I use Wysiwyg Perform to design my lighting rigs in 3d.
I usually hook Wysiwyg up with my ETC EOS Nomad to pre-program and check lighting cues so that I can visualise my lighting before the set and lights are rigged in the theatres / opera houses where I work.
It would be a great time saver if I could import the Wysiwyg .wyg file into Augment 3d so that the theatre's lighting console programmer could see my rig at the console without having to redraw the set and lighting rig all from scratch.
I hope someone can set out a straightforward workflow that I could try.
Many thanks,
I'm not sure if any users have successfully exported a DXF from WYSIWYG and imported something working into Augment3d (if so, I hope they'll chime in!). You may need to find software online that can open DXF files and convert them to DAE, such as blender.org - Home of the Blender project - Free and Open 3D Creation Software.
Thanks Matt for your reply.
You're correct regarding the file formats that Wysiwyg can output which seems to be limited to .dwg.
I've tried importing a .dwg file exported from Wysiwyg, which contains a 3d model of a set and a lighting rig, but was very disappointed with how it arrived in Augment 3D. It was just a mess that I couldn't make any sense of.
Unfortunately, DXF and DWG formats weren't originally intended for 3D use and have quite a few limitations when it comes to the information needed. Most often the issue with exporting from Wysiwyg to that format is that not all of the planes have normals facing the correct direction.
I was playing with that last night. worked reasonably well. There are a few things I need to figure out involving custom images on surfaces, but over all it was very cool.
I was also playing with MVR between wysiwyg, Vectorworks, and MA3 on PC and found it to be pretty great. Definitely some things I need to learn, particularly on the MA3 side. But it is all very promising and cool.
Thanks for the input. I will hold out hope that ETC will eventually bring MVR into the fold. Until then I guess I just have to practice placing my fixtures in manually.
I don't own a copy of VW. I work with some LDs that do which is why I am excited for the MVR import/export between VW and WYSIWYG. Adding EOS into the mix would be cool, but those LD's are MA2/3 programmers while I am the EOS guy. So with my current client list it would only be myself that is benefitting from EOS importing MVR.
Thank you for the suggestion ueliriegg! Maybe I can convince my VW friends to do quick conversions for me when I am in a pinch.
We are considering MVR Import for a future version. In the meantime, you can find the current list of supported formats here: 3D File Formats Compatible with Augment3d - Electronic Theatre Controls Inc
Bobby Brinson John Bishop Theatermachine We are now working on MVR import for a future version of Eos (after v3.1.0). Would you be willing to forward us some sample MVR files from WYSIWYG R47 to help with that effort? You can email me mattp @ etcconnect.com or upload here.
I had some success, it imported the venue and hang structures/electrics, but no fixtures. When I import to EOS it says there are no channels in the MVR but the fixtures all have channels and most have patch data in WYG. If I import the MVR back in to WYG all the data is there.
It took me a very long time (longer than I'd like to admit) to learn that the button in the upper right corner of the editor was /the/ way to select the WYSIWYG editor. Even searching for variations of "enable wysiwyg editor" in DDG/Google didn't reveal anything other than there IS an editor available.
Suggestion: Add an option in the Edit or View Menu, Make it an option in the Tools->Options menu, and/or one of the landing spots in the CMD/Ctrl+L rotation sequence - the "wysiwyg preview" is a non-editable landing page currently.
@Daeraxa
apart from the fact that ctrl-shift-p under osx invokes the command palette and not the editor, there is no toggle_editor command under osx for any key combination. And the toggle_editor_layout command does clearly something else, but does not switch to the WYSIWYG editor.
Read this thread again, what do I overlook ?
But that is exactly what it is... how else do you enter a command? There is no default keybinding for Toggle Editors and there is a known issue where on keybindings it doesn't work both ways - see related incident Desktop: Command "moveToFolder" when bound to an accelerator only works when focus is on codemirror editor Issue #6063 laurent22/joplin GitHub.
Wysiwyg is so simple to use, it has brought me great success in China which has a rapidly developing lighting industry with new local fixtures being made all the time. Cast software is very quick and helpful when I make a custom library request for these new fixtures.Daniel RichardsonLighting Designer,
Programmer & Operator
Wysiwyg is my swiss knife for all my projects from the start to finish. I use it to sell the idea initially to the client, then communicating with technicians when assembling the stage and finally programming the show on site.Raphal GanhyLighting Designer,
Programmer & Operator
During the Rio Olympic Ceremonies, each of our 3 lighting desks had their own wysiwyg system. This allowed us to work when certain elements of our rig were not yet turned on or being maintained, or had been switched off because we had run out of diesel for the generators. There is no doubt in my mind, that along with English breakfast tea and chocolate digestives, without wysiwyg we would not have come anywhere close to the standard of lighting that we achieved in both Ceremonies.Durham MarenghiLighting Designer,
Durham Marenghi Lighting Design
We've used WYG for the best part of a decade and it is top of our toolbox, it's photo realistic portrayal of lighting and video allows us to deliver clients the idea before they invest saving time and money!Jamie ThompsonLighting Designer,
Co-founder of MIRRAD
Recently I spoke at the Highland Fling Conference in Edinburgh and, as part of my presentation on Choosing the right Content Management System, I had a bit of a rant about the use of WYSIWYG editors in Content Management Systems. I think these things are responsible for not only a lot of badly formatted content, but also for holding back the development of better ways of allowing non-technical users to deliver content.
WYSIWYG Editors suck because they promote thinking about style rather than content. While content editors are busy changing headings to Comic Sans, pondering the use of a grimacing smiley on their about us page or getting creative with colour, they are not considering the actual copy they are adding to the site.
WYSIWYG Editors suck because as a designer you lose control over big chunks of the design. Anywhere that allows people to enter HTML via an editor allows them to get as creative as they like, using any mark-up that they like. Unless you carefully go through and remove all the creativity that stuff is going to stay there. For developers, even if you switch off most of the buttons, just allowing the administrator to enter simple formatting and links, you still have a situation where a user is entering HTML which you then display on the website. This can enable all kinds of stuff to get into your content, which is then very hard to remove and fundamentally tied to the current design of the site.
We need a new kind of content editing tool. In Perch the default editor we use is MarkItUp with Textile formatting enabled. Textile is pretty simple to learn and MarkItUP means that users can select a bit of text and hit the bold button which will then wrap it correctly so when the form is submitted Perch transforms it into HTML strong elements.
The administrator has access to just a few simple tools for adding formatting, and the formatting is related to the content and not the design of the site. If it is correct for content to be emphasised that should remain the same after a redesign or if the content is used elsewhere other than on the site.
I really like the way the new Campaign Monitor editor works; editing within the context of the template, which I imagine returns to the editorial emphasis to content rather than style. Much closer to actual WYSIWYG too!
For me, MarkDown does everything I need and it would most definitely be my choice when writing blog posts, replying to support calls or writing KBs. If I want to get created I can just stick HTML in the post. Otherwise, the MarkDown syntax is much clearer to read and edit.
@Ben Bodian in context editing like this works well for simple stuff, however it is not without problems. See this post from Drew McLellan (my partner in life, business and web-related grumbling) on the subject: -lure-of-on-page-editing
One of the options you might want to investigate is something I got a brief demo of when I went to some level 1 Umbraco ( ) training a few months back and that is the integration between Windows Live Writer and Umbraco and it allows the client to basically use Live Writer as their wysiwyg editor and when it posts to Umbraco, their funky inline styles, rotated images etc are magically converted to valid HTML.
Of course if the website editor were approaching their content creation task with due care, they would check the published page (or a preview if your CMS provides that) and see the mistakes, read the documentation to learn how to correct them, and fix them.
Regarding the second problem, I implemented a solution much like Ben Callahan suggests above for a couple clients using our preferred CMS, ExpressionEngine. I wrote up a detailed explanation of how I did this here. Make adding inline images to ExpressionEngine entries safe and easy for your clients
Of course as Rachel alluded to in her article, there are those writers who see all these nifty WYSIWYG tools and spend their time playing around with fonts and colours and as a result both the design and content suffer.
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