#Special Effects

Flame, cold sparks, fog, confetti, streamers, balloons, fireworks and a drone show — placed in your scene and fired when you say.

Special Effects are the moments a show is remembered for: the confetti at the reveal, the cold sparks along the stage edge, the balloon drop at midnight. In EVT3D each one is an object you place like a light, size to the room, color to the brand, and fire on a timer or by hand. They land on your stage decks, stop at your walls and pick up the color of your lights, so the client sees the moment in the room it will happen in.

Special Effects are a visual preview for design and approval — not a safety plan, a licensing document or a flight plan. They are on every plan, Free included.

#What it does

#Nine effects, from one menu

Click + (Add) in the toolbar and open Add Effect. Pick one and it lands in front of you, standing on the floor, already firing and already selected, with its panel open. Every effect has Particle Size (Drone Size on the Drone Show) and Shuffle the Pattern (a new random arrangement of the same effect), and every one but the Drone Show has Amount and its own colors. The list below says what else each one sets.

• Flame Thrower — a jet of fire. Set its Height, Spread and Aim off straight up, and up to four colors that run from its base to its tip.
• Cold Sparks — a fountain of sparks for a stage edge or an aisle. Height, Spread, Aim off straight up, and colors from base to tip.
• Fog Machine — a plume of fog. Pick a Style: Fog machine (a jet that slows and billows), Low fog (fog that hugs the floor) or CO2 jet (a fast white column that is gone in a second). Then Throw distance, Spread, Thickness, one Color, and Air movement to carry it sideways.
• Confetti Cannon — a burst thrown out over the room. Style (Paper or Metallic), Throw distance, Spread, Aim off straight up, Time between shots and Burst length.
• Confetti Drop — confetti falling from overhead across an area. Style, Drop height, Area width and Area depth.
• Streamers — ribbons shot out over the room. Style, Throw distance, Spread, Aim off straight up, Time between shots and Burst length.
• Balloon Drop — balloons released from overhead. Drop height, Area width, Area depth, Time between drops, Release over (how long the release takes), and Show balloons waiting in the net.
• Fireworks — shells that burst high over an outdoor event. Style (Mixed, Peony, Ring or Willow), Burst height, Burst size, Spread to either side and Time between shells.
• Drone Show — a swarm of lights that flies from one formation to the next. Altitude, Show width, the number of Drones, and up to four Formations, each with a shape (Sphere, Rings, Heart, Star, Cube, Helix, Wave or Text) and a color. A Text formation spells a word of up to 18 letters, with its own Text size. Hold each formation and Time to re-form set the pace.

Confetti, streamers, balloons and fireworks take up to four colors, and each piece takes one of them. Confetti, streamers and fog have Air movement and Air direction for a draft across the room.

Select several effects of the same kind — every cold spark along the stage edge, both cannons — and the panel edits all of them at once.

#Autofire or Manual

Every effect has an Autofire switch at the top of its panel.

• Autofire on — the effect fires by itself. Under Timing, a flame, sparks, fog or a confetti drop either Runs the whole time or Fires on a timer (Every so many seconds, For so many seconds). A cannon, streamers and a balloon drop repeat on their own time between shots or drops.
• Autofire off — the word Manual appears beside the switch. The effect sits loaded and fires only when you press Fire Now. Timing then sets what one press does.

A new effect starts on Autofire, so you see it working the moment you place it.

#Fire Now and Reset

Two buttons sit under the switch, and they work in both modes:

• Fire Now fires the effect once, right now.
• Reset clears everything the effect has thrown — in the air and on the floor — and loads it again. Balloons go back in the net.

With several effects selected, both buttons work on all of them together.

On Manual, what lands stays: confetti, streamers and balloons lie where they fell until you press Reset, so you can fire the finale and walk the room afterwards. A flame, sparks and fog fade by themselves. On Autofire, each firing clears the one before it.

Firing and resetting are not edits. Nothing is saved and nothing is added to undo, and a project always opens with its effects loaded.

#Fire with a Look

A Look remembers whether each effect is on Autofire. Make a Look with the cannons on Autofire, and they fire when you switch to it — a "Finale" Look that brings the lighting and the confetti together. See Materials & Looks.

#Effects react to the room

Pieces do not fall through the room. Each effect reads the surfaces around it:

• The floor — pieces land on the venue's floor, and follow it where it slopes.
• Stage decks — confetti thrown over a stage comes down on the deck; sparks from a machine standing in front of the stage stay in front of it. A stage with Solid Surface switched off is not solid to effects either.
• The walls — venue walls and the walls and airwalls you build stop a piece, which then slides down the wall.
• The ceiling — a venue's ceiling and a ceiling you build hold rising pieces underneath.

Effects do not yet react to props, drape, truss, scenery, ramps or stairs — pieces pass through those. Fireworks and a Drone Show live in the open sky and read nothing.

#Effects react to light

Fog, confetti, streamers and balloons are lit by the room, and it makes no difference how the light is made: spot lights and point lights you place, and the washes EVT3D simulates — uplights, wash lights on drape, tube lights, an LED wall's Screen Light. Fog standing in a blue wash reads blue, and confetti falling through a beam is lit by that beam.

A Flame Thrower, Cold Sparks and Fireworks also give light. With Lights the Room on, their glow lands on drape, walls and the venue on every device, and on everything else on a desktop, flickering and firing in step with the effect. Light level sets how strong it is.

#Selecting an effect

An effect has no machine to click on unless you ask for one, so it is drawn as two boxes:

• The source — a small box where the effect comes from, shown as a thin orange outline. Click it to select the effect. A drop's source is the frame it falls from, overhead; click the frame's edges, so whatever is underneath stays clickable.
• The range — a larger, thinner box that appears while the effect is selected: how high the flame goes, how far the cannon throws, where the drop lands.

The orange outline is a gizmo, like a light's bulb, and follows the toolbar's gizmo switch ("Show gizmos" / "Hide gizmos"). With gizmos hidden, an effect that is not firing shows nothing at all — select it from its row in the hierarchy. The outline is never in a Capture, on an IMAG feed or on a viewer link; the effect itself is.

Check Show the machine for a simple stand-in machine on the deck. Leave it off to park the effect on a real machine from the library.

#Runs on every device

You do not set a quality level. Under Amount, the note says it: phones, tablets and lighter laptops draw fewer pieces than a desktop automatically, and everything draws fewer when it is far from the camera. All the effects in a scene share one budget of pieces, and if frames run long while effects play, EVT3D eases the detail down and brings it back when there is room. An effect that is not firing costs nothing.

#In the Budget

Effects get their own Special Effects category in the Budget, one line per kind — for example "Cold Sparks × 6". EVT3D has no rate for them yet, so each line is unpriced and reads Enter rate: type the price your effects vendor gives you, per unit for the show. See Budget panel and meter and Price Sheets.

#How you use it

1. Place the effect. Click + (Add), open Add Effect, and pick one. It lands in front of you, firing.
2. Put it where it goes. Move it like any object — a flame on the downstage edge, a drop over the dance floor. Duplicate it for a row of sparks.
3. Size it. Set the height, throw distance or drop height, and the spread or area. The range box shows what it will cover.
4. Color it. Set the colors to the brand. For fog, set its one color and let your lights tint it.
5. Decide how it fires. Leave Autofire on for an effect that runs through the scene, or switch to Manual for a moment you fire yourself.
6. Fire it. Press Fire Now, look at where everything lands, and press Reset to load it again.
7. Save the moment in a Look (optional). Put the effects on Autofire, save a Look, and switching to that Look fires them.
8. Capture it. Fire the effect and take a Capture for the deck.

#Why it matters

A special effect is the hardest part of a show to describe and the easiest to get wrong in a client's head. "Confetti at the reveal" means one thing to the producer and another to the brand team — until they see how far the cannons throw, where the pieces land, and what the room looks like afterwards.

Because the effects read the room and the lighting, the preview answers real questions before anyone orders anything: whether two cannons cover the audience or four are needed, whether low fog stays on the stage, how a balloon drop fills the dance floor. And because phones, tablets and laptops all draw them, the client sees the effect on a viewer link too, on whatever device they open it with.