Glossary¶

The vocabulary Moonshine uses, in the terms you would use on site.

Bake: Committing your warp edits so the projector renders the warped surface instead of the original model. Until you press Bake Warp, the sidebar tells you the projector is still rendering the source, and everything you have pushed is a working edit. Revert to Source throws the baked result away and puts the original geometry back. See Baking and reverting.
Cue: In show language, a stored look you trigger on command. Moonshine's equivalent unit is the playlist item: each item is something you can jump straight to from the transport's item list, in any order, without stopping playback. See Transport and cues.
Illuminance: How much light is actually landing on a surface, as opposed to how much a projector emits. Measured in lux. It is the number that decides whether an image reads in the room, and it falls off as the throw gets longer or the image gets wider.
Keystone: The trapezoid distortion you get when a projector is not square to the surface, and the four-corner correction that cancels it. Moonshine's 4-Corner editor is exactly this: drag each corner of the output until the projected rectangle sits where you want it. See 4-corner keystone.
Lens shift: Moving the projected image up, down, left or right without moving or rotating the projector — the optical equivalent of sliding the lens inside the body. Set as a percentage per axis under Lens Shift. Reach for it before you start angling a projector, because shifting keeps the image rectangular and angling does not.
Lock: The mechanism that stops two people editing the same thing at once. When someone else holds a lock, the controls in that area go dim and a strip reads (their name) is editing, with a Request access button. Locks are claimed automatically as you work and released when you move on. See Locks.
Lumens: The rated light output of a projector, entered as Lumens (ANSI) in its settings. It is a spec-sheet number, not a measurement — Moonshine uses it, together with throw ratio and distance, to work out the illuminance falling on your surfaces.
Lux: The unit of illuminance: one lumen spread over one square metre. The Lux view mode paints your surfaces as a false-colour heatmap of lux and reports Min, Avg and Max, along with the Uniformity (min divided by average) and Cover (the fraction of the surface reached by at least one projector). See View modes.
Mask: A stencil that decides where a projector's light is allowed to land — used to keep light off a doorway, a performer's position or the edge of a set piece. Painted with the Brush, or drawn as editable paths with the Pen, in Paint or Erase mode. See Masking.
Playlist: An ordered list of media items with a transport in front of it: play, pause, previous, next, jump to any item, and a loop mode of off, whole playlist or single item. A playlist only reaches pixels once it is connected to a surface. See Playback.
Presence: The live sense of who else is in the project — the avatars in the top bar, the coloured cursors moving across the scene, and the ability to follow another operator's view. See Working together.
Project: Everything that makes up one show: the projectors and their settings, the models, warps, masks, playlists, and the media library. You load, create, rename and delete projects from the project browser; opening a different one swaps the whole state.
Projection mapping: Aligning projected imagery to real physical geometry so the light lands exactly where the object is. The workflow in Moonshine is a chain: build a virtual scene that matches the room, place your projectors in it, align each one against the real surface, mask what should stay dark, then play media through it.
Selection set: A named group of vertices on one model, for one projector, with its own colour and vertex count. It is the target you warp: select the part of the surface that is misaligned, save it as a set, then push only those vertices. Sets persist, so you can come back to the same region tomorrow. See 3D surface warping.
Soft selection: The falloff that makes a warp look like a bend rather than a spike. Vertices inside the Radius move fully, vertices near its edge move partially, and Softness controls how gradual that transition is. Turn Show soft selection on to see the affected area shaded before you drag anything.
Surface: The physical thing you are projecting onto — a wall, a set piece, a vehicle — represented in the scene by a model. Each projector points at a Projection Surface, and everything downstream (warp, mask, media) is applied against that geometry. See Surfaces and models.
Throw ratio: Throw distance divided by image width. A 1.5 throw ratio means a projector 15 m away produces a 10 m wide image. It is the number that tells you whether a projector can fill your surface from where it is rigged, and Moonshine uses it to draw the frustum in the scene.
Transition: The blend used when playback moves from one playlist item to the next — the difference between a hard change of frame and something that reads as intentional. Set per playlist and adjusted item by item. See Transitions.
Warp: Deforming the projected image so it lands correctly on geometry that is not a flat rectangle square to the lens. Moonshine has two kinds: surface warping in the Scene tab, where you pull the 3D model's vertices to match the real object, and output warping in the Warp tab, where you correct the projector's 2D output with four corners or a bezier grid. See Alignment.