A light plot editor for rigs
small enough not to want a subscription.
plotedit draws a light plot to architectural scale, works out where the light actually lands, and gives you the paperwork. It runs on your own machine and costs nothing.
A Source Four on GRID C, with an LED retrofit in the barrel. The panel on the right works out the throw, the angle, how big the pool lands on the floor, and how much light is left after two colours of gel.
And what it prints. A demo plot drawn to USITT RP-2 and exported to ARCH D at 1/2" = 1'-0" — open the PDF to read it properly.
Mac or Windows. You need Python 3.10 or newer and nothing else — unzip it and double-click. Free software under the GPL.
What it does
- Pipes, booms, box booms and catwalks. Drag a light to move it, drag its ring to re-aim it.
- Real photometrics — throw, elevation, beam and field, and the footcandles through your gel. Every figure names the datasheet it came from.
- Beam pools drawn as the ellipses they actually are, cut at head height, at a face, or on the deck.
- Boom elevations beside the plot, per RP-2 §6.12.
- Instrument schedule, channel hookup, an Eos patch file, PDF and DXF out. Ground plans in from DXF or PDF.
- Imperial or metric — the whole sheet, including the drawing scale.
Coming
- Clearance checking. It currently does not know about masking, scenery or rigging points, so a trim it accepts may still hang into a border. Teaching it what else is in the air is next.
- A console-tested Eos patch. The export is written to the ASCII spec and has not yet been loaded into a real desk. Until it has, treat it as a draft and try it in a scratch show file first.
- Remembering a house. Circuits and dimmers belong to the room, not to the show — so the plan is to save a venue's circuit and dimmer positions once and have every plot you draw there start from them.
Every number it prints names its source, and anything it could not work out says so rather than being left blank. That is the whole design.
One thing it will never do
It does not know your room. No software does — it has never stood in it and it cannot measure anything. It works from what you tell it, says so on the drawing when a figure was never measured, and leaves the judgement where it belongs. Check anything that matters against something you measured yourself.
Who built it
I am a lighting designer who writes software. plotedit exists because I wanted to draw a plot for a small show without renting a seat of something built for a Broadway house, and because the arithmetic behind a light plot is worth getting right. It is not only mine any more — the first code from outside arrived four hours after somebody was handed the download.
Lighting design
Plots, sections, paperwork and the show itself, for theatre and dance.
jerryjonaslighting.com →Contributing
If plotedit will not draw a fixture you own, there is a written way to add it. Usually one line and no drawing at all.
How to add a fixture →