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 Ventuz crash with an error like 'The type initializer for Atalasoft.Imaging.AtalaImage threw an exception'?
A: It's possible that some Dlls are missing. Download and install 'Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable Package (x64)' or re-install Ventuz to fix that problem.
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 Runtime, 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: Why does the Ventuz Runtime freeze while loading the Presentation (VPR)?
A: If you are running on a Nvidia graphics card and have Quicktime nodes in your scene, this could be the reason: because of an unknown problem in the Quicktime API the Quicktime node freezes if it tries to load the movie for the first time in a background thread. To work around this problem open the Nvidia Control Panel and select 'Manage 3D Settings'. Set the 'Maximum pre-rendered frames' to zero.
Q: What are the changes in the license model
A:
Q: So the Director is not included in V4 Professional Designer?
A: The Ventuz Director is an separate product with a separate license
Q: How do I get a Professional Learning Edition?
A: Simply open the License Manager and request a PLE license from there. The PLE license includes all Ventuz 4 Features and the Ventuz Director for evaluation and learning purposes.
Q: I have build a project with the PLE version, can I use it with a licensed Ventuz version?
A: No projects and scenes built in the PLE version can not be transferred to any other Ventuz version.
Q: Why is none/only one touch 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 [MachineConfigurationMC#Interaction 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 [MachineConfigurationMC#Interaction 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: In the Property Editor I can see, that output properties of my Script node are changing but the nodes which are bound to this properties do not react on the changes. Is this a Bug?
A: No, this is not a Bug! Most probably you did not set the 'changed' flag correctly in the source code. Every time an output property changes, the 'changed' flag must be set to true because the Generate() method returns a boolean value dependent on this flag. Only if Generate() returns true, bound nodes are informed about the property changes.
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 is my fullscreen window sometimes minimized automatically as if by magic?
A: Make sure that every other running process cannot display any pop-up window. Also check whether the notification icons in the Windows Taskbar are set to “Hide icon and notification".
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 Ventuz not render my text elements?
A: To load all the character sets of a font into the memory would affect the performance massively. Due to that only the Latin and Symbol character sets are enabled per default. To activate different character sets you need to change the settings in the Machine Configuration.
Q: How do I enable Far-Eastern (e.g. Chinese or Korean) character rendering in Ventuz?
A: Open the Machine Configuration and enable 'Special 2' character set in the 'Culture Settings' section. And you certainly need a font which contains far-eastern characters.
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.
Q: Why does my DataPath DVI capture board not work with Ventuz 3 x64?
A: The current DataPath SDK does not support 64bit.
Q: Why do the OSC Nodes not work in the exported VPR presentation whereas everything worked fine in Ventuz Designer?
A: VentuzPresenter.exe which runs the presentation is different from Ventuz.exe (Ventuz Designer). So you have to configure the Windows Firewall for VentuzPresenter.exe as well to allow network communication.
Q: Why does my Remote Application using Ventuz .net Remoting not work any more after update to the latest Ventuz version?
A: Please check the Release Notes for changes in the Ventuz.Kernel.Remoting DLLs. If any of these DLLs has changed, you have to re-compile your remote application with the newest Ventuz.Kernel.Remoting DLLs!
Q: The Output property of my Script node is changing but bound nodes do not react on the changes! What's going on?
A: Most probably you did not set the changed property to 'true' in the Validate() method. This is necessary to inform bound nodes about the change of properties. Find more information here: C# / VB Scripts