Best Lighting design software for programming and visualisation on OSX

[Hagopm]

Hello All.

 

I want to program a mobile light sculpture and be able to export video renders of it in simulated action. It is a fairly simple installation, 8 x moving head lights in a circle, on a moving vehicle. I have read several of the posts on visualisation here and downloaded capture to have a play. However from what I can see, capture is a visualiser only and will not allow me to actually program the lights. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I have watched the videos and read the manual.

 

I assume this means that the many capture visualisations on youtube e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iZ5RQye5i0 have been programmed using something other than capture.

 

Can any recommend software that I could use to design, program, visualise and eventually run the installation? For OSX (no bootcamp) please. Thanks!

 

http://https//dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4067185/Octolucent%20sketch%202%20roof%20gear%20view.jpg

[paulears]

You can get quite a few bits of lighting software that have connectivity to things like wysiwyg and capture, and many of the real hardware controls also have the feature. I guess that normally people program on their console/control of choice and then for those that need it, which is not everyone by a long way, they then tweak it on the visualiser. I've always found that the limits are found by the representation of the things the rays land on. They cope with planes and spheres ok, but people and complex curves never work very well.

 

Learning a control you hate and a visualiser that is complicated is a nightmare.

 

If your visualiser needs are less complex, Magicq has one built in and is perhaps worth a go before you spend lots of money, but it might not meet your needs.

 

If you want photo accurate rendering then it's going to be a serious money project. Do you have the budget and time?