Cinema4D to OSC to ArtNET - repost from #lighthack

I posted in #lighthack forum before I saw this group. Please forgive the repost

I have a lot experience in Cinema4D and have recently been building a leko model with physically accurate intensity, throw length, falloff, lensing, gobos, etc and then movers with appropriate moving head controls, but I'm pretty green to EOS, the ION 6000 controller and even greener using EOSnomad (like just this morning green) so bare with me. Does anyone have experience exporting data from C4D to run a show? It's been a dream of mine to build the enitre show - lighting, video, projection maps, etc - in Cinema and export the timeline data to a controller to run show, and play the lights live over that timeline built in Cinema. It would be a great way top sell the show in advance with the lighting design, show quasi-accurate renders, manage the pre-production process, plan out the rigging, then of course actually programming the show off-site. I know it's possible, this guy has done it, but I'm a relative Luddite with PYTHON and more so with OSC. Just curious if anyone has experience with #lighthack or EOSnomad involved in that process.

Also brand new to the ETC forum (like this morning new), so wanted to post something to introduce myeslf.

  • I haven't heard on anyone going from C4D into a lighting console like you are asking about for pre-visualization (programming off-site).

    Pre-vis is pretty well established in the industry with commercial programs that accept control signals from a lighting console and show you an approximation of what the scenes/cues would look like in real life. Those programs are expensive, but have support from manufacturers and lighting companies to have the photometric information for many fixtures already included in their libraries.

    The idea behind this workflow is to use the lighting console to record the cues during pre-vis so that the transition to the real life rig is seamless (from a control point of view). So you are not using a different program to do the pre-vis and then exporting to the console - you are using the console the whole time. And since the lighting console is optimized for controlling lights, it's a lot faster than trying to use a rendering program's interface.

    Your idea sounds interesting, but it's backwards from the way current pre-viz setups work.

    Just throwing the info out there and making no assumptions about your experience in the field - hope it helps.

    -Todd

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