LightAct 4.2.0 is available

We are thrilled to announce the release of LightAct 4.2.0. It is more robust, flexible and packed with exciting new features. Here are just a few of the many improvements you’ll find:

Unreal Engine 5 integration

LightAct is now fully integrated with Unreal Engine 5.1.1, one of the most advanced game engines available today. This integration offers a powerful set of tools to create immersive and interactive experiences.

Multiple Timelines

You can now create multiple timelines in LightAct, each of which can be populated with multiple sequences. This new feature allows you to play several timelines at the same time, fade between them and much more. It gives you the tools to create truly unique and engaging experiences.

Sequence master fade and master volume

Every sequence can now be customized with its own fade in, fade out, master fade and master volume. Combined with fade controls on individual layers, this offers even more flexibility in designing your show.

Tracking Visualizer

Tracking Visualizer is a brand new feature which helps you visualize the tracking information inside your Viewport. Every individual beacon is now represented in the viewport so that you can easily check if everything is set up in the correct way.

ASIO & Multi-channel audio support

LightAct now fully supports multi-channel audio. It’s now possible to route your audio to any audio channel available on your sound card.

Genlocking

LightAct can now lock to the incoming video signal thus fully supporting high-end broadcast environments.

LUT node

Light Act’s LUT node allows you to change the colors of any other texture based on the mapping defined by the lookup table. This can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as color grading, color correction, or creating stylized looks. LightAct supports both .cube and .3d files.

Luma key node

The Luma key node is a powerful tool which can be useful for removing a solid background or other specific areas from a texture based on their brightness values. Together with other keying nodes, such as the chroma key, it achieves extremely precise keying results.

Other improvements

In this new LightAct version, you can also expect better Asset management, improved Timeline and Sequence management nodes, smoother polygon mask management, a new Delay node and more.

Pixel Magic

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LightAct 4 is now available!

The Wait is Over!

After more than a year of development we are extremely excited to release LightAct 4. While still being in Early Access stage, we believe you are going to love it. So let’s go through the major differences.

New GUI & Workflow

First off, we simply have to start with the brand new GUI!

We built it from the ground up, so everything is different (but still familiar for users of LightAct 3). For example we’ve added window docking, workspace saving, drag & dropping and many other usability features.

Achieve results faster!

Video & Image Sequence Playback

We’ve invested a lot of work into improving playback of video files and both compressed and uncompressed image sequences.

Supported codecs: NotchLC, HAP, HAPa & HAPQ in .mov containers, mp4 and others

Supported image sequences: tiff, jpg & png

New 3D Model Formats

LightAct 4 supports FBX, OBJ and DAE 3D file formats.

But wait, there is more! 

You can now import 3D models consisting of multiple objects and apply different textures to every object inside your 3D model.

Sub-Frame Real-Time Latency

With Notch, LightAct always had sub-frame latency between render-time of the engine and the ingest time of that texture into LightAct.

With LightAct 4 we’ve achieved sub-frame latency for Unreal Engine as well! 

LightAct 4 controls every aspect of Unreal’s render cycle and there is only a few milliseconds between the moment when LightAct passes new data to Unreal and triggers its render cycle to receiving the updated texture back from Unreal.

New Integrations

LightAct 4 supports all the major object and camera tracking technologies. Now there is almost no limits to what you can push into LightAct and what your content can respond to.

Spherical & Cubic Throwers

In LightAct 4, you can now use cubic or spherical throwers. This makes it incredibly easy to map 360° content to objects or video screens.

Cubic throwers are very useful if you have only a few sides of the 360 cube available, for example in Unreal Engine workflows.

Spherical throwers work with any equirectangular content.

10-bit Displays

LightAct 4 supports 10-bit displays!

Enabling this feature is as simple as checking one checkbox and restarting LightAct.

Output Remapping

Video output window has been greatly improved. For example, you can now:

  • Map only a sub-area of content onto an output
  • Rotate and scale content on an ouptut
  • Map one content to several outputs

Multi-server

LightAct 4 is multi-server ready. Create clusters of machines, transfer assets between them and sync them on a frame-by-frame basis.

Any number of servers for projects of every scale.

Pixel Magic

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Flexible Pricing with 3.4.0

LightAct 3.4.0 introduces an entirely new way of licencing!

We switched from a perpetual and rather rigid licencing model to one that is entirely flexible. Now you can choose exactly how long you want your licence for (even if it’s just for a week). 

But wait, there’s more! You can also choose exactly how many HD outputs and DMX universes you want.

LightAct software licences are grouped into 2 tiers: Base and Pro.

Licences in Base tier

  • Free
  • One
  • Easy

Licences in Pro tier

  • Creator
  • Player
  • Player Perpetual
Explore Licences

Make Magic with Light

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Dynamic AutoBlend in 3.3.3!

LightAct 3.3.3. was released just a few days after 3.3.2 and includes basically just one new feature. It is quite an important one, especially if you are doing projection mapping on either moving objects or/and very complex ones.

Continue reading

LightAct 3.3.2 has been released!

It’s been a busy few months since our last release and we are absolutely thrilled about the new tools and integrations.

But what what we are most excited about though, is to see what you are going to do with all the new tools and features.

So let’s go through the biggest additions…

Tracking Technology

LightAct 3.3.2 supports 3 most common tracking protocols on the market: BlackTrax, OptiTrack and PosiStageNet.

With PSN you can also get data from other providers of kinetic and tracking technology such as ZacTrack, Kinesys, TAIT, Stype, Stagetracker and many others…

Together with 3 real-time engines that LightAct works seamlessly with, this gives you some serious power.

Projector AutoBlend

While still in Experimental phase, we are very excited about projector AutoBlend feature. When projecting on complex 3D objects with several projectors you often want the entire object to be of the same brightness regardless of how many projectors are projecting on any given part of the object. Up until now, the only option you had was to draw dozens of polygon masks with Texture Polygon Mask node.

Enter AutoBlend, which calculates the brightness of every pixel in every projector based on the shape of the 3D objects.

TouchDesigner Data and Texture Sharing

We are big fans of TouchDesigner! That’s why we are very happy that our and TD’s users can now send Channels (CHOP) and Textures (TOP) via TouchDesigner’s SharedMemoryOut nodes directly to LightAct.

(that’s on top of texture sharing via Spout, of course)

Create Interactive Worlds!

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LightAct 3.3.0 is out!

After many months of work, we are finally releasing 3.3.0 into the wild!

It’s got so many new and exciting features that you will be amazed. 

LightAct Changelog

Notch & Unity support

Almost 2 years ago LightAct enabled full Unreal Engine support. It was and still is one of our most successful real-time integrations which was behind some of our most exciting projects.

But, we soon realized that while UE4 is great for photorealistic rendering and games logic, it can be a bit cumbersome for visual effects. And that’s why we are so excited that 3.3.0 enables full Notch integration. We cannot wait to see what amazing VFX our users will do with LightAct & Notch.

On the other hand, some of our users told us that while Unity and UE4 both can do a lot of similar things, they also both have a significant learning curve. So instead of forcing all of Unity users that want to use LightAct, to switch to UE4, we instead integrated Unity as well. We published 2 free Unity plugins that take care of 2-way texture and data sharing between the 2 apps.

This, of course, doesn’t mean our support of UE4 is ending. On the contrary, in the next month or so, we will publish some very exciting projection mapping upgrades for UE4 workflow. Stay tuned!

New Servers

Another partnership that went really well for us is the one we have with Dell EMC. They manufacture all of our servers and their support and global on-site warranty have been really beneficial to us.

That’s why, when launching our new servers, we didn’t think twice about whom to call.

We took 2 of Dell’s established rack platforms and launched 2 ranges of servers: Pro Solo and Pro Sync.

Pro Solo

Pro Solos are compact 1U servers designed for single-server installations.

But the 1U form factor shouldn’t confuse you to think they don’t pack a punch. They come in 4 versions: 400, 2000, 4000 and 6000. The number signifies the type of Quadro NVidia card installed. This means that, yes, Pro Solo 6000 has one insanely powerful Quadro RTX 6000 card in it!

Pro Sync

Pro Syncs are 2U servers designed for multi-server installations.

They come in 2 flavors, Sync 4000 and Sync 6000 and, similarly to Solos, the number tells you the model of Quadro NVidia RTX card used. This means that Pro Sync 6000 has a Quadro RTX 6000 as well as Quadro Sync II in it. 

New Projection Tools

We’ve had the pleasure to be involved in some exciting projection mapping projects recently (to be published soon) and as a result of it, we’ve significantly upgraded our projection mapping tools. Everything is quicker and more intuitive to do and 3DCal (our 3D projector calibration toolset) has received the largest number of improvements.

Also, LightAct can now import Dome Projection‘s projector warp & blend data. This gives LightAct an ability to use camera based projection calibration.

WebUIs improvements

Last but not least, LightAct WebUIs have received a number of cool upgrades. New widgets such as checkbox, image, separators and datetime pickers make WebUIs more powerful, versatile and easier to stylize

Create Interactive Worlds!

Download LightAct Now!

Lightact v3.2.3 is released!

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]We are very excited to launch Lightact v3.2.3 today. It’s got a number of new features for projection mapping and is even easier and more intuitive to use. WebUIs also got a number of upgrades our users have been asking for.

So let’s get straight to it.[/vc_column_text][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ size=”24″ font_weight=”bold” margin_top=”60″ font_family=”none”]Projection Mapping

[/mk_fancy_text][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ line_height=”24″ font_weight=”bold” margin_top=”30″ font_family=”none”]Projector 3D Calibration

[/mk_fancy_text][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/g4KelPVVHgY” animation=”bottom-to-top”][vc_column_text]Projector 3D Calibration is a new feature which allows you to precisely match the location, rotation and field of view of your virtual projector with the location, rotation and field of view of the real projector.

This is the key component in the projection mapping workflow where you use UV mapped OBJ objects.[/vc_column_text][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ line_height=”24″ font_weight=”bold” margin_top=”30″ font_family=”none”]Softedge

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Texture softedge node has been upgraded substantially. Now you can create polygonal softedge masks with as many corners as you want.[/vc_column_text][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ size=”24″ font_weight=”bold” margin_top=”60″ font_family=”none”]Console

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Console has been pushed to the forefront with Lightact v3.2.3! Now it appears in the main Visualizer window and you can set the color and duration of every entry in Print to Console node.[/vc_column_text][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ size=”24″ font_weight=”bold” margin_top=”30″ font_family=”none”]WebUI Upgrades[/mk_fancy_text][vc_column_text]

WebUIs include a new widget called Variable Scheduler. It allows you to adjust variable values in advance.[/vc_column_text][mk_padding_divider size=”80″][mk_button corner_style=”full_rounded” size=”xlarge” bg_color=”#161619″ txt_color=”#ffffff” icon=”mk-flaticon-downloading3″ url=”/lightact-latest/” align=”center”]Get Lightact v3.2.3[/mk_button][mk_padding_divider size=”120″][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Lightact v3.2.2 is Out!

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Today we are launching Lightact v3.2.2! We took a bit longer for this release because we wanted to add some quite significant upgrades. Actually, there are some many new features that we’ve split this announcement into 2 posts. The biggest upgrade by far is the updated LightNet feature. It allows you to create frame-accurate syncing of several Lightact servers (as it is a brand new feature it might be a bit rough around the edges). You can find a more detailed description of this feature in the previous blog post about v3.2.2. or in our Changelog.[/vc_column_text][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ size=”24″ font_weight=”bold” margin_top=”60″ font_family=”none”]Visualizer Upgrades[/mk_fancy_text][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ line_height=”24″ font_weight=”bold” margin_top=”30″ font_family=”none”]Bloom[/mk_fancy_text][vc_column_text]

The biggest upgrade is the ability to add Bloom to light fixtures, video screens and projected objects. This allows you to create more convincing project visualisations.[/vc_column_text][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ line_height=”24″ font_weight=”bold” margin_top=”30″ font_family=”none”]Object labels, Primitive objects & Markers[/mk_fancy_text][vc_column_text]

You can also show labels above any object in the Visualizer, add Primitive objects (cube, sphere, cylinder and plane) or Markers.[/vc_column_text][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ line_height=”24″ font_weight=”bold” margin_top=”30″ font_family=”none”]Adjustable Camera View Angle[/mk_fancy_text][vc_column_text]

You can adjust camera view angle in the Visualizer. Most of these Visualizer settings can be changed in a new Visualizer menu.

[/vc_column_text][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ size=”24″ font_weight=”bold” margin_top=”30″ font_family=”none”]WebUI Upgrades[/mk_fancy_text][vc_column_text]

WebUIs include a new widget called Command Scheduler. It allows you to setup commands to be automatically triggered whenever a certain condition (or time) is met.[/vc_column_text][mk_padding_divider size=”80″][/vc_column][/vc_row]

3.2.2 Announcement

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]We are doubling down on our commitment to provide a media server for great installations. That’s why we took a bit more time to release v3.2.2, but wait till you hear about all the new features that we are packing in. They will make those of you that want to create big multi-server Lightact installations, really happy.[/vc_column_text][mk_padding_divider][mk_image src=”https://lightact.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/190701-lightNet-v322.jpg” image_width=”1280″ crop=”false” hover=”false”][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ size=”24″ font_weight=”bold” margin_top=”40″ font_family=”none”]

Multi-server operation

[/mk_fancy_text][vc_column_text]Lightact is a server for great installations. “Great” can mean many things and “big” is usually one of them. That’s why we are very happy that Lightact v3.2.2 can now scale up to an almost infinite number of machines. Frame-accurate multi-server operation with project creation and management on a single machine and deployment to an infinite number of slave machines will be possible.

Everything is set up in the Devices window and the most critical operations such as projection warp & blends and video screen content mapping are distributed to the correct machine in an instant.

In addition to that, multi-server Lightact installation works seamlessly with Unreal Engine’s nDisplay. This means you can easily create projection mapped multi-server Unreal Engine installations of almost infinite size.[/vc_column_text][mk_padding_divider size=”80″][mk_image src=”https://lightact.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/190529-fileDragDrop.gif” image_width=”480″ crop=”false” hover=”false”][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ size=”24″ font_weight=”bold” margin_top=”40″ font_family=”none”]

Ease-of-Use

[/mk_fancy_text][vc_column_text]With this release, we also embarked on a long and ongoing journey of ‘reducing the number of clicks’ needed to achieve what you want. This, for example, pushed us to (finally) implement asset file drag & drop, project opening by double-clicking on a project file in Windows Explorer, Layer Templates and Layer copy & paste, OBJ files can now grab texture directly from Image assets and much more.[/vc_column_text][mk_padding_divider size=”20″][mk_divider thickness=”1″][mk_padding_divider size=”20″][mk_fancy_text color=”#000000″ highlight_color=”#000000″ highlight_opacity=”0″ font_weight=”300″ font_family=”none” align=”center”]There are so many improvements, that we are going to have to put others into the next blog post.[/mk_fancy_text][mk_padding_divider size=”20″][mk_divider thickness=”1″][mk_padding_divider size=”80″][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Prolight + Sound 2019

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We are extremely excited about the upcoming Prolight + Sound exhibition. It’s happening in Frankfurt, Germany and starts on the 2nd of April.

We are going to present Lightact v3.2.0 – a culmination of a year of development, as well as brand new Pro software licenses and StereoView module.[/vc_column_text][mk_padding_divider size=”20″][mk_divider][vc_column_text]The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and the European Union under the Cohesion Fund/European Regional Development Fund/European Social Fund or in the case of two or more funds under the European Structural and Investment Funds.

For more info: http://www.eu-skladi.si/[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][mk_image src=”https://lightact.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Logo_SPIRIT.jpg” image_width=”300″ crop=”false” hover=”false”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][mk_padding_divider][mk_image src=”https://lightact.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/MGRT_slo.jpg” image_width=”300″ crop=”false” hover=”false”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][mk_image src=”https://lightact.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Logo_EKP_sklad_za_regionalni_razvoj_SLO_slogan.jpg” image_width=”300″ crop=”false” hover=”false”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][mk_padding_divider size=”0″][mk_divider][mk_padding_divider size=”20″][mk_button corner_style=”full_rounded” size=”large” bg_color=”#161619″ txt_color=”#f2f2f2″ url=”/lightact-changelog/” align=”center”]Check out the Changelog[/mk_button][mk_padding_divider size=”80″][vc_column_text]

Pro Software Licenses

Lightact has always been about enabling our users to create great installations. And since we launched Lightact 3.1.0 a year ago, we realized that many of you are perfectly capable of building your own servers. For those of you, we are thrilled to present Pro software licenses. They come in 3 flavors with different output sizes, but in general, they have all Lightact’s features unlocked. You can use Lightact Manager with them, WebUIs as well as LightNet & LightSync.

With Lightact Pro Licenses you can build your own media servers.[/vc_column_text][mk_padding_divider size=”20″][mk_button corner_style=”full_rounded” size=”large” bg_color=”#161619″ txt_color=”#f2f2f2″ url=”/get-lightact/#software” align=”center”]Find out more[/mk_button][mk_padding_divider size=”80″][vc_column_text]

StereoView

StereoView is our brand new stereo vision module. It gives you a precise depth image at long-ranges on dynamically lit scenes with frame rates of up to 70.

It includes 2 cameras with a variety of lens options, and an image processing module. You connect it to your Lightact server via Ethernet.

It comes in 2 options: standard and Pro, which has a better resolution and framerate.[/vc_column_text][mk_padding_divider size=”20″][mk_button corner_style=”full_rounded” size=”large” bg_color=”#161619″ txt_color=”#f2f2f2″ url=”/stereoview/” align=”center”]Find out more[/mk_button][mk_padding_divider size=”100″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]