Soon to start learning LOR software

[GRG]

Soon I will be pulling the plug and ordering my LOR equipment and software.  I assume I will take the plunge and dive into S5.  Having watched many videos on the S5 software, I am still left with a question on the preview.  I totally understand how to get a picture of my house into the software, but what I have not seen discussed is what to do if your house has props on three sides.  I have my display in my front and side yard as well as my back yard.  The only thing I have come up with is to do some photo editing and "unfold" my house into one long area.  Is this the thing to do or am I already missing something?

Thanks for your replies in advance.

 

[k6ccc]

First of all, there is absolutely no requirement to have a background photo of your house.  In some cases it makes perfect sense, but in many cases, it does not.  I do not use a background photo - and never have.  I have a somewhat odd shaped yard so everything is at odd angles.  For some sequencing, it makes it easier to have the props shown and "regular" 90 degree angles.  This is my 2018 Preview:

Parts of that are not overly far off, but some are substantially not correct.  In some cases, stuff is placed where it is convenient to fit.

You may want to put the photo of the front of the house, and place the props in the front yard.  Then add the sides to the left and right.  You may or may not want to leave the background photo of the front.  Up to you...

 

[GRG]

19 minutes ago, k6ccc said:

First of all, there is absolutely no requirement to have a background photo of your house.  In some cases it makes perfect sense, but in many cases, it does not.  I do not use a background photo - and never have.  I have a somewhat odd shaped yard so everything is at odd angles.  For some sequencing, it makes it easier to have the props shown and "regular" 90 degree angles.  This is my 2018 Preview:

Parts of that are not overly far off, but some are substantially not correct.  In some cases, stuff is placed where it is convenient to fit.

You may want to put the photo of the front of the house, and place the props in the front yard.  Then add the sides to the left and right.  You may or may not want to leave the background photo of the front.  Up to you...

 

Thanks for the ideas.  I kind of like the no house look.

 

[TexasLights]

In my case, the yard is complicated (see my signature).   I took four pictures and combined them into 1 large image which can show across multiple monitors.  If you have a single monitor, that doesn't work as well with S5 as S4.  With S4,  you could scroll the picture but S5 forces it to fit to the display.   

The key thing is to get perspective of what your display will look like.  Some people get very elaborate and draw actual things like bushes, where if its just an AC colored light string, I just draw a few lights at that spot.  Almost, all of my display is AC light strings and a few pixels and the pixels are the only ones that use an actual prop layout.  See this link from my FB page.  

I have played with the idea of using different previews for different sections but its not quite as easy as i would like.  Perhaps something LOR is working on. 

 

[k6ccc]

26 minutes ago, TexasLights said:

The key thing is to get perspective of what your display will look like.  Some people get very elaborate and draw actual things like bushes, where if its just an AC colored light string, I just draw a few lights at that spot.  Almost, all of my display is AC light strings and a few pixels and the pixels are the only ones that use an actual prop layout. 

I'm sort of the opposite in one respect - I started with pixels and dumb RGB (even for my year round landscape lighting - which is what I started with).  Out of my 66K channels, there are less than three dozen AC channels - and over half of those are the two singing faces.  Some of those are fairly well drawn out (the singing faces), but some are shown as one or two lights (most are just one light).  Like you, the pixels are drawn fairly accurately, but are not necessarily drawn in the actual location.

 

 

[TexasLights]

why "one size" never fits all as they say... 

I did open up a feature request to make it easier to view a portion of the preview.    That would make it easier to have 3 different sections, a front, back and side and be able to just watch that portion.   I could do it with visualizer but have not found a way to do it with S5 Previews...