Thursday, April 25, 2019
Staging a Scene with AutoCAD
autocadresources.autodesk.com: Consider the art of stage choreography. No, not the kind where energetic singers in brightly colored leotards earnestly hoof their way through a showstopper, but how they interact with the set around them; how buildings appear and disappear in the time it takes to play a few bars; and how someone with a balcony ticket has a completely different (though no less intriguing) visual experience than someone sitting front row, center.
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When I opened up this article I was expecting something more I'm not quite sure what but something. To me it is of course a no brainer that a theatrical designer especially on sets and set construction would use AutoCad as their preferred drafting platform there was no need for debate or discussion. I understand some lighting designers use Vector Works and even some set and scenic designers but the standard for a good while has been AutoCad and I don't think that will change for a good while. I guess what I was really hoping for this article to be more about was 3Ds max and Autodesk's other drafting/design platforms for a better visualization of sets and designs. My TD/Technical teacher in highschool was a Scenic Designer by trade and degree and he to this day is the only designer that I know of that would draft their shows almost entirely in 3d in AutoCad both so they could visualize it and so that he could 3d print it and see it in person. But that being said as an interesting first step I'd love to hear/see someone take this idea a step further and create a 3d viewing platform in which a Set could be better visualized in 3d as a full rendering on a computer, I don't think we are far off but I'm also not sure the technology is there either.
Like Mattox, I am more than a bit confused at what the intent of the article was. It felt more like an ad for AutoCAD than it was a meaningful discussion on drafting program choices. While there are a number of solutions for drafting and modelling, the two main programs used by the entertainment industry are AutoCAD and Vectorworks. From what I can tell, AutoCAD is more popular among scenic designers and technical detailers, and has thus become the de facto standard for scenic work. My one major gripe with autoCAD is that there is a really steep learning curve between 2D and 3D modelling, which would make a huge difference in terms of previsualization and demonstration of a unit prior to building it. In high school, I 3d modelled my sets because I could show the director what it looked like and generate most of the drawings I needed at the press of a few buttons, rather than painstakingly redrawing everything for a new view.
I have been trying really hard this semester to like AutoCAD. I spent the first few months writing it off and saying I would just draft everything by hand for the rest of my life. Which, though I still think hand drafting is a lot more enjoyable and artistically fulfilling, it’s not as practical, especially with how often things change. Reading articles like this gives me insight into the more complex functions of AutoCAD, past simple wall elevations and ground plans, which encourages me learn more than just what it took to pass an exam. I find it interesting how much this draftsman harps on AutoCAD however, because in my experience Vector Works seems just as effective while having a much more user-friendly interface. But I suppose that may only apply to when you are first learning the program, and once you understand the language, either one would probably become second nature. But I do wish they had discussed actual features that gave CAD an advantage because that’s something I’m curious about.
Oli’s job description is interesting to me. We are taught here, in the scenic design curriculum, that the scenic designer should always be the one, or at the very least one of their assistants, to draft a ground plan, section, design elevations for each unit, build and provide a model, and the specify paint treatment and provide elevations for that accordingly. To read that Oli makes all those “design drawings” based on a provided model makes me wonder what the design process and designer contracts look like at the National Theatre. I also found that with the work I have been doing in Intro to Scenic Design and the Collaboration Project, the title of this article rings very true. My design team walked through all the staging for our play by drawing all over the ground plans my co-designer and I brought to our meetings. Autocad has been a brilliantly fast moving tool to be able to adjust things in the drafting to adjust and recheck how the scenery is set in the space and interacts with decided acting areas.
This article was disappointing I was sort of hoping for some cool feature that Autocad had incorporated that made it possible to see scene shifts easily and gave you the ability to plan them out in Autocad in a new streamlined way. That was not what this article was instead it was more of Autocad being like, hey look theatre people are using our software too, and every technical theatre person is like yes, we’re aware, it is an industry standard so it is an excellent choice. I don’t think this article was really meant to be read by people in the theatre industry because it’s all information we’re aware of. I think it was an interest piece for Autocad users outside of the entertainment industry for them to go huh, that’s interesting. Perhaps Autocad creators thought that theatrical users built off of napkin sketches and experience, which isn’t an outrageous assumption, I’m sure some places do build like that still and in some settings that is a perfectly valid way of building. However with the level of complexities that can be seen in the designing and engineering of scenery needing a CAD program to do that work in shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
Auto CAD is an interesting beast. I often find it challenging to use when I’m designing simply because there are better programs available. That being said there are several features that Auto CAD offers that many other programs cannot. Because of this many companies have drifted toward using the program and have created multiple custom interfaces that would make it very difficult to change to another software.
Because of this fact, I am under the impression that it doesn’t matter whether or not I like the software or not… I have to use it. Like many people that don’t inherently use Auto CAD as their preferred software, it is very difficult to bring yourself to make the transition. This has been difficult for me in the past few months because I both want to be prepared for my future but am also very much attached to the software I'm accustomed too.
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