How to Build Content for Multiple Screens

This How To will teach you how to properly build content for multiple screen setups. Before you start it could make sense to read this guide How to configure a Multi Screen Setup, to correctly configure Ventuz. While in the Designer you can create projects without knowing how to set these up, you might want to have insights into it to understand the workwise of your content much better.

Introduction

Working for a multi screen setup needs testing and the knowledge how to properly shift content around so it fits nicely on the screens. These are the topics we are going through:

• The different modes of the Renderer Window and the Stage Editor.
• Useful information for building the content
• Creating pixel perfect content
• Moving things across multiple screens
• Presenting your project

Renderer window and the Stage Editor

There are different modes for the Renderer window. These can be found in the Stage Editor. If it isnt open currently, just go to View -> Stage Editor.

Useful information

Now that you know how to work with the Stage Editor, lets put it into context with the Renderer window and what to do with it. When you select a configuration and open a new empty scene, you might wonder why the Renderer window still looks the same.

By default the Stage Editor is in the Cluster preview mode. Which shows the whole render space that Ventuz uses. In order to see the borders of the screens you have to put content into it. Here is a simple example with 3 screens and a white background Layer to show the gap between screens 2 and 3:

These white rectangles are representing your screens and all that is grayed out wont be visible when presenting the project.

When you switch to the production mode you will see what is actually on the output of each screen.

Creating Pixel Perfect Content

Lets say you want to have a video clip playing only on the screen on the left (1). If you now throw in a Movie Clip layer it will be stretched over the whole render space. You could now adjust it by hand with the properties. But this will most likely be inaccurate. In order to get it pixel perfect you have to change some properties in the Movie Clip layer.

Changing the layout to pixels and the relation to device -> left -> top. Will perfectly align the clip to the top left corner of the rendering space.

Moving things across multiple screens

Ventuz' synchronization capabilities across GPU outputs and even across machines allows you to show continuous content that is spanned over several screens. Let's say you want to have content moving from left to right on two of your screens.

Having content move across multiple screens is fairly simple as you only need to arrange according to your screen setup using the Layout properties like above.

Problems with the Field of View

When having content span across several screens in the horizontal axis the content at the edges might appear stretched.

This comes from the default camera in the layer root. There are multiple ways to fix this issue. The first one is ignoring the camera and only moving the content with the layout Property of the 3D layer. To see the properties of the layer click  the small triangle beside the pencil.

By using the X and Y properties the content will be shifted around without any distortion. But this might be limiting in some cases since you are moving the whole layer at once.

What you also could do is drop a camera node into your hierarchy editor and changing the Field of View Axis to horizontal. If you now move the content around with the axis there will be nearly no distortion anymore.

It is also possible to use the camera X and Y Property either of the FOV axis or the different view modes to move things around. This will give you distortion free results.

Presenting your project

The only thing left to do now is exporting your scene as a .vpr to be able to start the Ventuz Runtime.

For some setups it might be easier than for others to make your .vpr work. If you need more help please visit this page.