UV Lightcards flash when interacting with ndisplay

Development Cinematics & Media Virtual Production
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1

When we interact with the ndisplay, the UV Lightcards are flashing in 5.6/5.7

This was not happening in 5.5 and obviously is not ideal because anytime we as operators interact with the ndisplay. This causes the cards to flash, and therefore the lighting to change.

2

Steps to Reproduce
Launch an ndisplay cluster, and add UV light card through the ICVFX window

Then make a change on the ndisplay, for example, changing screen percentage

What you will see is the light card flash on and off

Video example

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j4pvgh76DpGOVWG_ryBB8pHmt5kFykRs/view?usp=drivesdk

3

Hi Matthew, thanks for reporting this bug. We were able to reproduce it here and filed a Jira to get it fixed.

However, it seems to happen only with UV lightcards not 3D lightcards.

A short-term solution is to use the “Dome” view to place a 3D Lightcard instead of a UV lightcard.

UV lightcards seem to be affected by this only.

Best regards.

4

Yes we will let you know as soon as this get fixed.

5

Thanks, Matthew, for your very detailed feedback.

I will keep you posted with any updates on that fix.

Best regards.

6

Matthew, could you provide some video on snapping to a random rotation, please?

And any other things that you don’t like about Lightcards.

Thanks

7

I’ve asked my team to gather some feedback on the cards and will pass along that feedback this week

8

[mention removed]​

Here are some features that our previous in house lightcards had. I’ve created a custom blueprint wrapper to add in these features to the in engine cards but perhaps they can be implemented natively.

  • Separate texture slots for the texture and alpha channel (gobo) for more easier control over texture vs how its cut out
  • Control over the UVs, specifically to change tilting, horizontal/vertical flipping, and panning.
  • The two above features required modifying the Lightcard material, so the blueprint is overriding it, so suggestion is to have that material be overridable natively.
  • We implemented an array of textures and gobos and gave board operators control to pick through the array via DMX
  • In order to ensure a smooth transition from our in house version to the in engine version, we did not want our board operators to have to re-program on their end because of a brand new fixture profile. Therefore the blueprint wrapper I made re-implemented the DMX functionality using our fixture profile, rather than the hardcoded one that the DMXDisplayClusterLightCardExender component uses, again the suggestion is to allow the use of a different fixture profile.

I need to talk more with my team specifically about the lightcard snapping issue in order to get you more feedback on it.

But, if you drag around a light card via the ICFVX window with the “always flush to wall” option turned on, the card will be rotating itself to be flush to the wall, but this may cause the card to rotate unexpectedly depending on where you drag it, espeically if you have a ceiling and you drag the card to the center of it where it seems to “gimbal lock” or get stuck at the top of the latitude/longitude sphere that its moving around.

This, plus the fact you’ve got to explain to a board operator “your moving around a card on on a surface of a sphere with the latitude/longitude controls and then its snapping itself onto the mesh of the wall”

is way more complex than just saying

“here’s a set of cards for the wall, and a set for the ceiling, you’ve got horizonal and vertical controls to move it around” which is what UV cards gets us. Way more intuitive to understand for both Unreal and Lighting console operators. Hence why they are the preference and why we are pushing for the flashing to get fixed.

9

Hi Matthew, I will try to reproduce the snapping to a random rotation on Tuesday.

Thanks for repro steps.

10

Thanks Juan, It would be great if you could let us know when it is fixed so that we can hotfix our engine.

11

Hi, just wanted to follow up here,

Being totally honest controlling the 3-D cards is not intuitive because you are moving things around on a longitude/latitude sphere and then it’s also snapping to the ndisplay, for example when they first initialize they will snap to a random rotation as they snap to the ndisplay. this causes some finicky workflow is trying to get a card to go exactly where you want to go, it’s also always been the case that we want Lightcards stuck to surface of the ndisplay and not parallax or warp.

It is far more intuitive to simply drag cards around on a 2-D layout on the ndisplay, and this is how our lights cards that we developed before there was a built-in version in the engine worked.

It is also far more intuitive for board operators who control like cars via DMX to simply move cards around on a 2-D layout, which is the standard we’ve set throughout multiple productions.

We just went through a shoot using the UV cards with 5.6 and of course it was incredibly annoying that every time we touch the ndisplay the cards would flash on and off

Any way to push a fix through would be much appreciated.