This document contains frequently asked questions received by the Ventuz staff. Before posting to the forum or contacting Ventuz support, please check whether your question has already been answered here. Whenever something comes up multiple times, it is added to this list and the relevant documentation pages are improved.
Users new to Ventuz should also check the Common Mistakes by New Users document.
Q: Why does my presentation not run smoothly?
A: Assuming the hardware is powerful enough, there are various things that can cause a presentation to stall or stutter. For one, running a show is different from designing one. Read the document on Deployment and always run the final presentation in the Ventuz Presenter, not the Designer. The latter does auto-saving and many other things that are not necessary to run a presentation but can disrupt normal rendering. Then make sure that the presentation is running in Exclusive, not Virtual Fullscreen.
Q: What is the difference between the Ventuz Editions and which one do I need?
A: Ventuz Express Edition is the smallest version available in the sense of its feature set. It is intended for users that want to start learning Ventuz and is offered free of charge. There is no visual branding as with most other learning editions of 3D programs but a few key features required for complex application have been removed. The full production version is Ventuz Professional Edition, which offers advanced features such as scripting support, MultiTouch support, various input and output channels to connect to other devices and much more. The free PLE (Professional Learning Edition) offers the complete feature set of the Professional Edition but will add a visual branding (watermark) to all the rendered output. Finally, the Ventuz Broadcast Edition adds video in/out capabilities required in the broadcasting context on top of the feature set of Ventuz Professional Edition.
Q: Can I install Ventuz as 32bit application on a 64bit system?
A: Unfortunately, the unified installer introduced with Ventuz 3 does not offer any way to force a 32bit installation yet. However, there should not be much reason to do so anyway except for the lack of Quicktime 64bit support. If is is essential for you to run a 32 bit Ventuz on the 64 bit OS the only solution would be to install Ventuz on 32 bit system and copy the complete installation folder to e.g. Program Files (x86) on to your 64 bit machine.
Q: Why is none/only one touch is received when using Windows Touch?
A: First of all, make sure your display really sends Windows Touch information not just mouse position updates (which are converted by Ventuz into a virtual touch). Some devices come with a driver that supports multiple protocols (mouse simulation, Windows Touch, TUIO, ...). Check in the Machine Configuration that Windows Touch is enabled. Finally, check the relevant settings in the Windows Control Panel (see links in the Windows Touch tab of the machine configuration).
Q: Why are touches registered at the wrong position?
A: Enable the input diagnostics in the renderer window and check where the raw touch positions are registered. Most of the times, the problem lies in the input hardware or driver and not inside Ventuz.
Q: Why does the behavior of my Touch Rotation node look wrong?
A: First, check if the Rotation Mode (on- vs. off-axis) is set appropriately. You might also want to change the IntersectionType to "Mesh" and see if that improves things. Otherwise, keep in mind that the rotation node uses a plane as its mapping system. Try changing the RotationAxis so that it is aligned with the geometry and try to avoid using Axis Nodes underneath the Rotation Node. Instead, one should also put the Axis above the Rotation Node and thus transform both the mapping system and the geometry in a consistent fashion.
Q: I try to use the Touch Paint node to paint onto an object. Why is the mapping completely wrong?
A: Keep in mind that the Touch Paint node uses a planar mapping and is thus largely independent of the actual geometry underneath it. A 1:1 mapping is therefore only possible if you use a unit size Rectangle. For any other geometry, if the geometry is transformed or if the mapping of the Rectangle is not set to "Flat", the results might not be what you expect. Use a rectangle directly underneath the paint node and then apply all transformations to both by adding the appropriate Axis above the paint node.
Q: What is the Touch Pattern node for?
A: The Touch Pattern node can be used to detect abstract movement patterns, for example if the user swipes to the left in order to navigate through a collection of items. For more information, see Touch Pattern.
Q: What is the Touch Marker node for?
A: Some camera based tracking systems are able to identify unique objects instead of declaring everything a generic touch. These are often also called Fiducials. For example, if a glass has a special barcode on its bottom and is placed on an appropriate surface, the system could read the ID and pass the information to Ventuz. To use marker objects, your hardware device has to send TUIO 2dobj messages containing the unique ID. Those will be relayed to the Touch Marker node with the appropriate ID set. This node can be ignored when only a Windows Touch based system is available. For more information, see Touch Marker.
Q: Why does a Windows Touch display not trigger the Mouse I/O nodes?
A: When touching a Windows Touch display, two kinds of messages are emitted into the Windows operating system. For one, WM_TOUCH messages are send that are touch specific. To allow applications without explicit multi-touch support to support the display, Windows also create artificial WM_MOUSE... messages. These messages however behave somewhat weird in that order of mouse movement and press events can be mixed up. For those reasons, Ventuz does block all artificial mouse messages when the Windows Touch checkbox is activated in the Machine Configuration. If a scene that uses mouse nodes is to be used with a Windows Touch device, deactivate the Windows Touch checkbox to treat the device as just a mouse.
Q: Why isn't the correct interaction node triggered by my touch?
A: By default, a quick ray vs. bounding box intersection test is used. The bounding box of an object however can be much larger than the object itself. For more precise intersection, set the IntersectionType property in the interaction node to Mesh. This is a bit slower but exactly compares the touch against the triangles of the geometry.
Q: The documentation says the Node XYZ has Property ABC but I don't see it. Where is it?
A: When selecting a node in the Hierarchy Editor, the Property Editor only shows properties that have been marked as favored. You can either click on the same node in the Content Editor or deactivate the "Show only favored Properties" option under Tools/Options/Tree Editors. For more information, see Property Editor.
Q: I've added a Rectangle with a Texture in front of it to a scene. Why is the Rectangle still white?
A: If no Light source is added to a scene, Ventuz uses the internal "head light" (a directional light at the point of the viewer) and if no material is in front of a geometry, it will get the default material. Since the rectangle's normals are looking towards the viewer, the specular coefficient is one and therefore the whole triangle looks like one giant highlight. Add either a light source and change its direction or add a color node (which does not have a specular coefficient).
Q: Why is my Fullscreen window minimized if I change to another application?
Q: What is the difference between exclusive and non-exclusive fullscreen?
A: In exclusive fullscreen, DirectX will take over the complete screen. While this offers the best rendering performance, switching to another application will hide the rendering output. If you work with Ventuz alongside some other applications and are constantly switching, you should rather use the non-exclusive (a.k.a. virtual) fullscreen mode. This creates a window that is the size of the display and hosts DirectX inside that window. While performance may not be as good as in exclusive fullscreen, the rendering output will stay alive even when switching to another application.
Q: Why are some OTF fonts not displayed in Ventuz, even though I can use them e.g. in Word?
A: Ventuz uses some Microsoft classes to load and read font data. With certain OTF fonts these classes throw exceptions and do not load the font. The only solution to use such fonts is to convert them to TTF format. (Use a program such as Font Creator from High Logic for conversion.)
Q: Why does my DeltaCast board not work correctly although I installed the drivers Ventuz suggests?
A: Try to shutdown your computer, remove the card, wait a bit, put it back in and reboot. There is a known issue on DeltaCast's side that sometimes the driver does not correctly initialize itself and this seems to be the only thing that helps. You should contact DeltaCast to report this problem.