View modes¶
Change how the Scene viewport shades your surfaces — to check texture placement, projector coverage, measured brightness, or plain geometry.
The switcher sits in the floating toolbar at the top-left of the Scene viewport, to the right of the Object / Select / Warp buttons. Four modes: UV, Projection, Lux, Solid.
| Mode | Shows | Use it to |
|---|---|---|
| UV | Media mapped onto the surface by its texture coordinates, shaded by the viewport's own lighting rather than by your projectors | Check that content lands on the model the way the designer intended |
| Projection | The same media, but only where a projector physically reaches | Check coverage, shadowing and overlap before you trust an alignment |
| Lux | A false-color heatmap of measured illuminance on the surface | Check brightness in real photometric terms — lux or foot-candles |
| Solid | A flat shaded color, no media, no projectors | Read wireframes, selections and warp handles without a busy image behind them |
The mode is a personal view setting, not project data. It is remembered on the device you are working from, and changing it does not change what other operators see or what the projectors output.
UV¶
The media is sampled straight onto the surface through its texture coordinates and shown at full strength everywhere, whether or not a projector could reach that part of the model.
This is the mode for content questions: is the video on the right face, is it the right way up, does it repeat where it should. Because projectors are ignored, nothing you do to a projector changes what UV mode shows.
Projection¶
Projection mode starts from the same media and then gates it by what each projector can actually light. A point on the surface is lit only when it is:
- inside a projector's beam,
- facing that projector rather than away from it, and
- not blocked by other geometry in the scene.
Everything else goes black. That black is the point of the mode — it is the honest answer to "does anything actually hit this wall". Where two projectors overlap, their contributions add, so overlaps read brighter than single coverage.
Within one projector's beam, the parts of the surface closer to the lens read brighter than the parts farther away, and surfaces raked away from the beam read dimmer than surfaces facing it. A projector's Brightness setting scales its whole contribution.
Note
Projection mode is a coverage preview, not a brightness measurement. Each projector is normalized so that its own Brightness is what you see where the beam meets the surface — pulling a projector farther back does not dim the preview, and the projector's rated lumens do not enter into it. For absolute brightness, use Lux.
Taking a projector out of the preview¶
Select a projector, then in the Scene tab's Properties panel use:
| Toggle | Effect |
|---|---|
| Projection Preview | Mutes this projector out of the preview. The surface is shaded as if the projector were not there — useful for checking what a single projector covers on its own. Click again to bring it back. |
| Frustum Preview | Hides only the projector's beam wireframe in the 3D view. Coverage is unaffected. |
Muting affects Projection and Lux together — both are built from the same set of contributing projectors. In UV mode the toggle is dimmed, because there is no projector contribution to mute.
Note
The preview shades up to eight projectors at once. Muted projectors are dropped first, then the first eight of what remains — in projector-list order — are the ones that light the surface. On a rig larger than eight, mute the machines you are not currently assessing so the ones you care about are inside the eight.
Solid¶
Solid mode fills every surface with one flat, shaded color. Media and projectors are both ignored.
Use it when the image is fighting you: soft-selection falloff, warp handles, wireframe density and silhouette are all far easier to read against a neutral fill than against a moving video. When Solid is active, a color swatch appears at the right end of the toolbar — click it to pick the fill color.
Lux¶
Lux mode turns the viewport into a light meter. Instead of showing your media, it colors each point of the surface by how much light lands on it, in lux — lumens per square meter — and gives you a legend, live statistics, and a hover readout to interrogate it. The legend, statistics and controls appear together in the bottom-right corner of the viewport whenever the mode is active.
This is what you use to answer questions the eye cannot answer from a preview: is the far end of the wall bright enough, how much are we losing at that angle, how hot is the double-covered seam, is a 5,000-lumen projector enough at this throw.
What it measures¶
For every projector that is not muted, Moonshine works out how much luminous flux the beam spreads over how much solid angle, and then how much of that lands on each point of your surface — accounting for the distance to the surface and the angle the surface presents to the beam. Contributions from every projector are summed before coloring, so a two-projector overlap reads roughly twice as bright as either projector alone.
The result is incident illuminance: the light arriving at the surface. It is not a prediction of perceived screen brightness, which also depends on the surface's own gain and color.
Set this up first¶
The numbers are only as good as what you tell Moonshine about the rig:
| Input | Where | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Lumens (ANSI) | Projector settings | The rated light output. This is the single biggest driver of the result. |
| Brightness | Projector settings | Acts as a 0–1 dimmer on the rated output. 1 is full. |
| Throw Ratio | Projector settings or the Properties panel | Sets how tightly the flux is concentrated. A long lens puts the same lumens on a smaller area, so lux goes up. |
| Resolution | Projector settings | Sets the image aspect, which shapes the beam. |
| Projector position and rotation | Properties panel or the viewport gizmo | Distance and incidence angle drive the falloff. |
| Model scale | Your source model | Distances are read in meters. A model built at the wrong scale gives confidently wrong lux. |
Warning
Build the scene at true size. A room modeled at a tenth of its real size will report roughly a hundred times too much light, because illuminance falls off with the square of distance.
The legend¶
The vertical color bar to the right of the panel is the scale. Three labels mark it: the top is your Max, the bottom is your Min, and the middle is the midpoint of the scale — the arithmetic midpoint on a linear scale, the geometric one on a logarithmic scale. Values are shown in whichever unit you have selected.
Controls¶
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Min / Max | The two ends of the color scale, entered in the active unit. Anything below Min takes the bottom color, anything above Max takes the top color. |
| Auto | Fits the scale to the surface currently being measured — bottom to zero, or to the measured minimum on a log scale; top rounded up to a round number above the measured maximum. It does nothing while no projector reaches the surface. |
| Linear / Log | How color is distributed across the range. Linear is right for comparing values in a narrow band; Log spreads out the dark end when your rig covers orders of magnitude. |
| lx / fc | Display unit: lux, or foot-candles. Switching converts every readout, the legend, and the Min/Max fields. |
| Turbo / Viridis | The color ramp. Turbo is high-contrast and reads hot-spots fast; Viridis is perceptually uniform and better for judging gradients or for color-blind-safe review. |
| Isolux | Draws contour lines at fixed illuminance intervals, like elevation lines on a map. Turn this on to see the shape of the falloff rather than just its color. |
Your choices here are remembered on this device between sessions.
Surface statistics¶
The panel above the controls reports the whole illuminated surface, refreshed a few times a second:
| Reading | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Min | The dimmest measured point on the surface |
| Avg | The mean across the surface |
| Max | The brightest measured point |
| Uniformity | Min divided by Avg, as a percentage — the ANSI-style uniformity figure you would quote in a spec |
| Cover | The share of the surface reached by at least one projector |
Two other states appear here:
- Illuminance — sampling… — the measurement has not produced a result yet, usually for a frame or two after you enter the mode or load a model.
- No surface illuminated — there is geometry, but no projector currently reaches any of it. Check aim, throw ratio, and whether the projectors you expect are muted out of the preview.
The hover light meter¶
Move the pointer over the surface and a small readout follows it, showing the illuminance at exactly that point in the active unit. Points no projector reaches read — (unlit).
Use it to spot-check the places a single number can't describe: the seam between two projectors, the corner farthest from the lens, the point where a truss casts a shadow.
Note
The hover readout and the statistics panel treat the surface as unobstructed — they measure the beams reaching a point, without subtracting objects in the way. The colored heatmap does account for blocking. If a readout looks higher than the color under the cursor suggests, something is standing in that beam.
While you are moving a surface¶
Dragging a surface with the transform gizmo temporarily flattens the heatmap to a neutral shade, freezes the statistics panel and hides the hover readout. Values that recompute under your hand every frame are noise, not information. Release the gizmo and the measurement returns immediately.
A working method¶
- Set every projector's Lumens (ANSI) and Brightness from the actual rig, not the defaults.
- Switch to Lux and press Auto to get the scale around your real values.
- Read Cover first. Anything short of 100% means part of the surface is dark — fix aim or add a projector before worrying about brightness.
- Read Uniformity. A low figure means the surface is hot in one place and thin in another; usually a raking angle or a projector too close.
- Turn on Isolux and look at the contour spacing. Tightly packed lines mark a fast falloff — the part of the image an audience will read as a bright edge.
- Hover the seams between projectors to confirm overlaps are where you intended them, and are not stacking into a hot band.
- Mute projectors one at a time with Projection Preview to attribute any surprise to a specific machine.