As the traditional lines between lighting, scenic, video, rigging and other forms of visual and production design continue to blur and merge, designers have found their work frequently venturing into newer and exciting territories. I can’t remember the last “lighting” design that I did that didn’t also include other production elements, some input into other visual mediums or at the very least involve some serious practical rigging elements. In recent years, several lighting previsualisation companies have observed the trends emerging in lighting and production design and dutifully kept their respective software packages moving in the same direction. With this in mind, I think it’s now almost reductive to consider any previs system solely on the quality of its lighting capabilities; even if you’re not designing the other elements you most certainly need to include them for your programming, renders, pitching or paperwork.
To be considered a worthy player in the increasingly competitive previsualisation market today, there’s a whole lot more that needs to be considered than lighting. I want to see how light reacts on different surfaces and materials, to be able to accurately visualise reflections in scenery and flooring, to see gobo focuses through the air, to see trusses fly and confetti fall, shadows from performers and arena floors full of people gathering around a B stage. Funnily enough – these are all elements you should be considering as a designer anyway – so it’s a simple ask that as previs advances, it is increasingly able to mirror the actual wants and needs of the lighting designer in today’s market.
It is for this reason that back in late 2012 I went looking for a previs package that could combine as many typically production design elements with an industry-leading lighting system. It was – and still is – ridiculously easy to write off the free visualisers that come bundled with consoles; their clunky, restrictive interfaces, obvious limitations and lack of accessible technical support and driven innovation are just as relevant today as they were eight years ago. After testing every other package I could find, I stumbled on LightConverse (Now known as L8).
L8 was – and to some extent still is – known for its horrific graphical user interface. We had a running joke in the office that “my first previs system” deterred almost everyone from using it. However; there were many standout features from this relatively unknown Ukrainian development team. Live render quality was stunning – when Mandylights used L8 to visualise the 2013 Ultra Music Festival main stage, we were clocking 30fps frame rates with just under 1,100 moving lights – this was unheard of back then, and even today many systems struggle or just give up under these loads. On top of this, we could play with automation, detailed – and accurate – texture mapping and play in a workspace up to a cubic kilometre in side. Fast forward only a few years and L8 added support for Oculus Rift and a whole raft of industry-leading innovations. At the Vina Del Mar music festival in Chile, we ran L8 side by side with an identical rig in MA3D and by the end of the festival, we had several LDs heading off to buy their own dongles after the two products proved to be incomparable, both in terms of output frame rates and fixture accuracy. We learned to ignore the GUI and focus on the detail and the incredibly powerful features that the system leads with.
If all of this sounds like a bit of a history lesson, it’s because I think it’s important to demonstrate that L8 is not a new player to the game. Long term LDs will know the immense frustrations of dealing with new previs software – there are always years of working through minor annoying bugs, getting seemingly simple and obvious feature requests incorporated and having the inevitable arguments with developers and other users over what requests should take priority. I spent years working through this with ESP Vision in the mid-2000s, and also spent considerable amounts of time with Martin Show Designer, WYSIWYG and other packages – I wasn’t keen to repeat it with L8. With this in mind, I think L8 has emerged as one of the – if not the one – most stable, comprehensive, feature-packed lighting and production design previsualisation systems available. At this point, largely because I’ve just named all of the other packages, it’s worth noting that Depence 2 shows incredible potential too but is a little further back on this timeline. That said, it’s easy to say that this new upstart has become L8s major competitor in less than a year which has created some exciting times.
L8 operates in two immediately definable modes; the first allows users to setup and configure designs and then create, record and playback shows of any size without needing to connect a console or even go through the laborious patching process – something I loathe wasting time on when the project might still be in pitch stage. You’re able to instantly and easily create entire visual states straight out of the gate – including video projection, pixel-perfect LED walls, laser effects and automation. A second mode allows for the more traditional visualisation operation, where the software accepts inputs from any of the usual suspects – from MAnet to sACN, Artnet. Etc – or even a mix of those with ease. You can switch between modes at any time that make it great for throwing a design together and setting up some looks for a pitch, before patching and programming your design before it heads out on tour.
The software enables builds to take place either within the L8 system or by importing external objects. Sporting a library of a few thousand objects including everything from truss and stage pieces through to the always-included-but-never-really-explained tanks, trees and even architectural cornices and columns. Building is simple; objects snap together, there are sensible layout, alignment and measuring tools and making quick adjustments to lighting fixtures, projectors and lasers takes seconds. Importing files, however, is where L8 really shines. Despite notably lacking GDTF and MVR import at the moment, L8 can export from VectorWorks, AutoCAD and other standard design packages in a proprietary .3dl format. As a seasoned VectorWorks user, I can vouch for the plugins easy installation and operation which exports both lighting fixtures and stage geometry quickly and easily. As with any previs systems, a little knowledge about how to reduce polygon counts and export with a good file naming system goes a long way when wrangling large previs files, but that’s a whole other topic. L8 also imports and exports from Excel, making batch patching, alterations, etc simple.
Back in L8, the software alternates between three clever build and previs screens. In the “fixtures” module, you get to focus solely on fixtures – adding and manipulating lights without the worry of accidentally selecting the stage or set. Switch to the “room” module, and you can play every other piece of geometry in the show without being able to move your lights. The GUI adapts to display relevant controls, making for a very simple build process. when you’re ready to go, exiting out of either module takes you back to a home screen where your design is rendered in real-time.
L8 excels with real-time modifications of haze, ambient light, real-world camera lenses and movements and stunning bloom, glare and halation effects. Camera controls are brilliantly responsive if you add a 3D mouse but frustrating if you’re trying to navigate with a traditional tracking device or keypad. There are a handful of glaring and annoying inconsistencies in navigation between different modes, but these can be worked around.
When all is said and done, however, it’s all about how it looks. I won’t delve into the hundreds of features that I’ve found to make L8 great, but some of them really stand out such as ‘Normal Mapping’ – where 3D textures can give depth to flat objects, such as grass on a festival site or waves on a harbour. Mirrors and real-time reflections were a game-changer, and many other packages still can’t achieve real-time mirror effects – let alone at the usable frame rates that L8 offers. It’s also possible to tweak fixtures inside the software – so getting them to act a little more realistically or even a little better than reality for pitches is a simple process. More importantly than feature sets, however, is render speed. some packages offer most of the elements that I’ve mentioned above, but sacrifice frame rates to often unusable speeds. With a well-built file, we visualised this year’s Mardi Gras Party with just over two hundred fixtures, reflective stage surfaces, some twenty video surfaces, moving trusses, over four hundred LED tubes and several hundred metres of truss inside a detailed 3D model of Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion. For fun, we put a crowd of a thousand on the dance floor, brought in live video NDI and then threw some animated dancers on the stage – all while rendering above 30fps.
There’s also beauty in the details. I design a large number of light artworks and we use L8 extensively to visualise intricate details in LED tape, emissive and reflective surfaces – you can take any object and make it emit light and control it like a lighting fixture. It’s also possible to configure these elements without taking away from your fixture count – so it’s entirely possible to visualise a detailed TV set of multiple LED surfaces in tiles, tape, etc without consuming all the resources of the software.
So what about getting those sweet, sweet images and videos out of L8 and into your deck? L8 is one of the few previs systems that will produce a 4K render in less than 10 seconds. I don’t really need to say any more than that. Video files capture in real-time and then render out slowly but reliably; depending on their complexity I usually find that video is pushed out at a rate of 1:10.
The package comes with a suite of “paper” tools as well that can supposedly be used to create lighting plots and other paperwork, but it’s somewhat rudimentary and any power user will easily revert to VectorWorks after a quick look. One notable inclusion is a stunning 3D heatmap of lighting output, where at the click of a button you can check the uniformity of your lighting in the same real-time 3D environment – this feature has proven invaluable on several television and automotive expo projects that I’ve worked on. The software comes in a number of versions too, from the education-aimed CE licence at around $AU150 through to the blistering Unlimited licence that will let you drive 2,000 fixtures with a whole host of great features that will set you back around the same amount of money as a small car.
There are a few other parting notes worth mentioning. L8 deserves respect for offering updates and product support for life – with no preset annual subscription required to keep the product functioning. In a world where more and more software is shifting to annoying and costly subscription models, L8 only charges modest amounts for significant additional new feature packs – and there’s only been one so far.
Support for the product has always been a little cumbersome largely due to language barriers with the development team and a patchy network of distribution, but the addition of LX Hues in Australia as a distributor has gone a long way to improving local support and ensuring that feature requests are noted and hopefully considered.
As a designer, it’s vital that my previsualisation workflow is as accurate and true-to-life as possible. I want to see multi-part fixtures work properly, need to visualise accurate strobes and view the rig in context with the other elements of the stage and room. It’s 2020, and any visualiser team or distributor that tries to sell to you with the excuse of “oh, it’s just for lighting” is not only dismissing the capabilities of what previsualisation is capable of today, but also dismissing the very nature of your changing role as a lighting designer; where all elements of a design are considered at every stage.
Those who know me know that I’m very passionate about the tools that I use and demanding of their performance in large scale and complicated environments. While there are always going to be annoyances in any professional product, I feel that L8 is largely unmatched in most areas; largely due to the developers creating a piece of software that seeks to emulate and support the design process and life rather than dictate how people should adjust their own workflow to match a program. Good idea, right?!
https://l8.ltd/l/
Australian Distributor: LX Hues https://lxhues.com/
Richard Neville is a Sydney-based lighting and production designer with credits spanning theatre, fashion, television, dance parties, concerts and corporate events in Australia and around the world. He is a founder and co-owner of Mandylights, the region’s first dedicated lighting and visual design firm. Mandylights has completed hundreds of projects in over fifty countries in the last fourteen years.
