Wrong Preview when Layering Canvas Areas

Support
1

I believe the preview for the canvas areas might have an issue.

So I was trying to share the workload of a very complex clip where my scanners weren’t fast enough to draw it nicely across multiple lasers. So a part of the graphic is in Clip 1, outputted by Laser 1 and another part of the graphic is in Clip 2, outputted by Laser 2 and so on. Therefore I made four Target Areas and put one Canvas Beam Zone exactly on top of each one of those. See picture.

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Then I reset the placement of that Canvas Output Zone, so all Lasers emit in the same direction.

Next I made two clips with an identical circle, only the color is different. The red one is on Canvas Zone 1 and the green one on Canvas Zone 2. As you can see in the following picture the lasers do output what I expect. Unfortunately I a travelling right now and couldn’t check with a real laser. But the canvas preview doesn’t make sense to me. I would have expected both cicles to be in the same location. Instead I see a preview of the target areas. I get, that is the preview of the canvas. But I think it would be more useful to have a preview of the actual projection, so the plane where the beams actually intersect the projection surface.

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Hopefully this was somewhat understandable.

Best regards,

Martin

2

Hey Martin,

Thanks for the detailed explanation (and the screenshots - really helpful!).

The canvas preview in the 3D visualiser is literally just the 2D canvas view placed into 3D space. It’s there as a guide to show what the overall canvas output looks like, and it won’t change based on how you set up your canvas zones or which lasers they’re assigned to.

The beam previews, on the other hand, show what each laser is actually projecting. If you want those beams to line up with the canvas image, you’ll need to position your lasers in the 3D visualiser so they line up with the part of the canvas each one is projecting.

So in short: the canvas preview = a fixed map of the canvas, and the beams = the actual projector output.

Hope that clears it up!

Seb