Throwcast is a 3D planning studio for projection rigs. Import your venue, place projectors with real optics, and read lux, pixel density and blend overlap live — before anything goes on a truck.
GLTF, OBJ or FBX — or model the room in place: drop in the architect’s floor plan, scale it to life, and trace it into real walls with sketch & extrude. Every surface is a projection target and an occluder from the moment it exists.
Throw ratio, lens shift, aspect — validated against a real 30-projector production. Blend arrays clone a rig into grids or rings and keep driving them as you edit.
Lux, px/m, throw distance, keystone widths and blend overlap — planar and true-keystone — recomputed live as the rig changes. Hover anywhere for a per-projector probe.
A lux heatmap and a content preview, occlusion-aware, with no baking — up to 32 projectors simultaneously. Switch shading modes and the venue repaints instantly.
Optics is half the job. Throwcast models the venue and carries the rest of the rig in the same document.
Drop a floor plan or elevation into the venue — on the ground, on a wall, on any face. Measure one known distance across it and the whole drawing scales to life. It’s a drafting aid, not a screen: never lit, never an occluder, but always there to dimension against.
Sketch on any plane — lines, rectangles, circles, with dimensions typed mid-gesture — and push a closed outline up into a solid. Bodies stay live-linked to the drawing: move a wall in the sketch and the geometry follows. The riser with a notch, the set wall in plan, the room itself — shapes no primitive can make.
Flat, curved, a closed 360° cylinder, or a dome. One object, one shape field you can change at any time — a wall that turns out to be a cyc keeps its position, its name and every annotation pinned to it. A dome is placed by its centre of curvature, where the audience sits, so tilting a planetarium is one rotation about that point; it asks for a radius and a dome angle, which are the two numbers the trade quotes.
A cut is a body you place, not a field on a wall. Push a box through the wall and you have a doorway; drag it and the doorway moves, scale it and it resizes, hide it and the wall closes up. One cutter opens everything it touches, so in a corner it opens both walls at once. Nothing is stored about what cuts what, so nothing goes stale on undo.
Typed ports on every device. Connect two and the cable exists in the 3D scene — lengths come from the routed polyline plus slack, not a guess. Tray networks are derived from geometry, so there is nothing to keep in sync.
A 2D signal diagram, fully driven by the document: device nodes, typed ports, colored cable runs. Drag port to port to patch; the FOH rack nobody modelled lives here too.
The Device tab is a library workshop: projector and device definitions with real 3D bodies, port panels, lenses and per-format throw ratios. Definitions drive every instance in the scene — edit the machine once and the whole rig follows.
A bundled vendor catalogue plus your own custom definitions. “N in scene” badges show where each machine is used; Make unique forks one instance onto its own copy.
Cabinet dimensions, a raised UST head, sockets placed on real faces. Duplicate a port and it keeps type and direction, numbered the way a back panel is.
Fixed or swappable, with per-format throw ratios and shift travel. A UST marks its exit window; a right-angle lens shows the cabinet side-on to the beam.
Four steps — machine, lens kind, projection scheme, review — solve a projector from the spec sheet you actually have, including shift travel derived from a printed image-position range.
Side and top elevations with dimension lines, driven by a live calculator: distance and image width solve each other, zoom slides the throw-ratio range, shift and aspect update as you type. Pin distance or image width and zoom drives only the other.
A report page is a sheet you arrange blocks on — 3D views, text, cable and equipment schedules, rack elevations, diagram slices, blend-array tables. Drag, resize, snap, duplicate, then export the set as a multi-page PDF at 150 or 300 dpi.
A schedule, a rack elevation and a blend-array table are derived the moment the page is drawn, so they cannot go stale. A view block carries its own camera, hidden set and annotations — including lux and px-per-m pins that recompute, so the numbers on the sheet stay true as the rig changes.
A view block can render black edges on white paper instead of the lit venue — hidden lines removed, the grid pale as construction lines. One page can carry the shaded render and the line drawing of the same rig side by side, so a report that has to print in black and white, or be dimensioned over on site, now can.
Throwcast is opening in early access. Join the list and lock in launch rates when it ships. Every account opens on a worked demo venue — twelve projectors in three blend arrays, truss, a wired rack and a seven-page report — rather than an empty grid.