What's New

Modern Mapping Matter is a ground-up rewrite of the design tool many of you already know. The familiar shape is still here — projectors, screens, rigging, photometric and brightness analysis, shareable snapshots — but the platform underneath is new, and almost every workflow has been rebuilt around real-time collaboration, layered scenes, AI-assisted product creation, deeper truss and LED workflows, and a publishing pipeline that finally treats your design as the deliverable.

This page is the tour. Each section calls out what’s new or materially better than the previous version, with deep links to the full documentation for each feature. If you’re carrying scenes across, your legacy work is one click away in the launcher’s Migratable tab — see Open or create a scene.

Designed together, in real time

Mapping Matter is now a collaborative editor. Two or more designers can be in the same scene at once, with live cursors, presence avatars in the header, and short-lived scene locks that prevent conflicting writes. See Collaboration.

For the rest of the world — clients, lighting designers, freelancers, the production manager who needs to sign off the rig — publishing is now first-class. A snapshot is a named, locked, independent copy of the scene at a moment in time. You publish a snapshot then attach as many shares as you need: anonymous URLs (with optional password), per-email invitations that surface in the recipient’s Disguise Cloud dashboard, or both. View counts surface on every share, individual recipients can be revoked, and the whole snapshot can be invalidated in one click without losing the source scene. See Publish & share.

A new Layers system organises the scene the way drawings have always been organised. Every object lives on a named layer with a colour swatch in the Scene panel, and the Layers panel lets you toggle whole groups visible or hidden in bulk. The same picker is in the Publish & Share dialog, so you can send the lighting designer a snapshot of only the lighting layer, or the venue a snapshot with just the structural layer — without touching the source scene.

Revisions are no longer a “last 10 opens” rolling buffer. Every committed edit lands in an auto-save that flushes in seconds, and a new revision is cut whenever editing settles (or when you close the scene) — so an evening’s work reads as named checkpoints in the Revisions panel, each restorable in place.

Smarter modelling, smarter snapping

The transform gizmo has a brand-new global Snap control in the viewport toolbar. Pick one of five modes — Off, Grid, Vertex, Edge, or Surface — and the gizmo locks onto the nearest target on any visible mesh as you drag, including truss members and observer figures. A green disc indicator confirms the snap target live. See Snap modes.

The 3D asset library now reports an imported mesh’s bounds in your scene’s active dimension unit — feet, metres, mm, anything — instead of forcing you to read millimetres. A new Scale Reference picker drops either a 1.8 m human figure or a 1 m³ wireframe cube next to the mesh while the Import Settings overlay is open, so you can confirm scale at a glance before committing. See Import Settings.

Object hierarchy works the way you expect: drag any node in the Scene panel onto another to reparent in place, with a visible drop indicator and the same parent rules as the Properties Parent dropdown. Multi-selections move as a unit. See Reparenting in the Scene panel.

The whole editor is dockable. The Scene, Properties, Layers, Brightness, Pixel density, PDF layouts, Revisions, Scene settings and viewport-tuning panels are all in a bottom-edge Panels strip — click any to open or close it. Drag a panel’s tab to any edge to dock it as a rail, drop it on another tab strip to merge them, or drag it onto the viewport to float it. Your layout persists per scene, so a projector-heavy rig and an LED-only rig can have completely different workspaces.

LED screens, first-class

Where legacy Mapping Matter focused on projection, modern Mapping Matter treats LED walls as full peers. Click LED in the toolbar’s add cluster to open the LED library overlay — catalogue tiles plus any custom tiles you’ve added — and lay out a wall with horizontal and vertical tile counts up to 100 × 100. The Properties panel exposes pixel pitch, tile model, brightness in nits, mounting style and content texture, with a derived read-out for total resolution, dimensions, weight and power draw aggregated across every tile. See LED screens.

Walls can be curved, either concave (toward the viewer) or convex (away), around the horizontal or vertical axis. Sweep the Tile Angle parameter and the panel shows live derived geometry — radius, total curvature, chord length, depth — so you can size a wall to a venue’s structural curve in feet of arc, not trial and error.

LED walls plug into every other system. They contribute to the brightness viewport heatmap and surface coverage statistics. They can be mounted on a truss via the same Mounting collapsible projectors use. They can be duplicated through effectors — the Polar Array and Fan modes are particularly useful for stacked LED rings and toed-in walls. And the new Layers system means an LED-only snapshot is a single click away.

AI-assisted product creation

If a projector or lens isn’t in the catalogue, hit + Create custom in the projector library and start typing a manufacturer and model. Modern Mapping Matter fires a background AI research call against the manufacturer’s specs and shows an AI suggestions ready banner at the top of the form. One click on Apply all populates every still-empty field — throw range, fixed optical offset, adjustable shift envelope, mount slug — with sourced values; any field you typed yourself is left untouched. The lens name and lens-mount fields are also autocomplete-driven, pulling matches from the product DB and falling back to a fresh AI lookup when there’s no DB hit. See Custom projectors.

The custom-product workflow knows about ultra-short-throw optics specifically. Pick a UST lens — catalogue or custom — and the projector sidebar surfaces a UST lens — add a fold mirror? banner with an Add suggested mirror button that drops a 45° fold plate aimed at the projector’s current target, sized to catch the chief ray. From there you fine-tune like any other mirror. See Suggested mirror for UST lenses.

Custom projectors save into a per-project “Project copies” group at the top of the library overlay and behave identically to catalogue models everywhere else in the editor.

Trusses and mounting, rebuilt

Modern Mapping Matter ships a complete truss and base library under a new Mounting popover in the toolbar’s add cluster. Seven truss profiles — Tower, Horizontal Span, Goal Post, A-Frame, Ladder, Arc, Ring — and four base types — Base Plate, GB Block, Sled, Outrigger — with parameterised geometry, custom variants, and a full catalogue overlay you can search by cross-section. See Trusses and mounting and the Truss library.

Mounting a projector or LED wall onto a truss is a drag away. Drop the projector near a truss and Mapping Matter offers to clamp it to the nearest centreline; once mounted, the projector tracks the truss as you reposition the rig and slides freely along the chord via the Clamp position slider in the Mounting collapsible. Effectors mounted on a truss carry every copy with them, so a polar array of projectors moves and tilts as a single unit.

Trusses also get a continuous clash check against scene meshes. Any truss that intersects geometry pulses red so a hire-house operator can spot the conflict at a glance. Toggle the warnings via the Clash button in the viewport toolbar’s display cluster. See Collision warnings.

Analysis, end to end

Every analysis mode from the previous version is here, faster and richer.

Photometric analysis computes lux per surface, plus coverage and overlap, and now reports contrast ratio per surface so you can validate a wall against a 5:1 minimum at a glance. Projection accuracy splits into two modes — Pixel Density for resolution-on-wall checks (px / mm², px / ft², whatever your scene unit is) and Pixel Stretch for projector keystoning, with an Auto Adjust that snaps the colour bar to the current scene peak. Both have a quick on/off in the toolbar’s display cluster and a full configuration panel in the Panels strip. The Brightness viewport is a live lux heatmap with draggable min/max range handles and per-scene auto-fit, and adds a projection texture overlay so you can preview content directly on the rendered surface, regardless of beam visibility.

A new POV camera treats each saved camera as a real Three.js camera with its own resolution, FOV, focal length and sensor size — pick one from the toolbar’s Camera popover, and an inset preview opens in the viewport showing what the camera sees. See POV camera.

Observers are a new class of camera shaped like a person — head, body, eye-level bar — that you drop into the audience plot and walk through with WASD. Switch the toolbar’s Acuity button on and a new Human Acuity overlay colour-codes every projected and LED pixel by how it compares to the 1-arcminute (20/20) acuity threshold from the observer’s eye. The colour bands update live as you walk, so you can validate seat-by-seat coverage instead of guessing from a fixed POV. See Observer and Human acuity.

Rounding out the viewport tools: Projection distance helper colour-codes each surface by its distance from the nearest projector for focus-zone planning; Object edges shows wireframes over everything; Material override swaps every surface to a neutral grey for blocking checks; Mouse look captures the cursor for free POV navigation.

Output and handover

The PDF layouts system turns the editor into a producible-document tool. A layout is a reusable page template — title block, table of projector specs, page size, viewport pose — that you save from the Export dropdown and reuse on any scene. See Export & PDF layouts. CSV exports cover projector and tile data for downstream media-server prep.

The viewer side of publishing is the mapping-matter-viewer plugin: a public, account-optional, read-only renderer that opens any share link. Recipients see the scene in a navigable 3D viewport with the title block, designer name, the layers the snapshot included, and an optional brightness toggle — no sign-in required, no access to the source scene, no edit affordance.

Tooltips, slider polish, and other quality-of-life

A lot of small things add up. Every icon-only button in the viewport toolbar, the object sidebars, and the dock panels has a PrimeVue tooltip with the keyboard shortcut rendered as a teal-bordered chip. Panel sliders are now full-width with a larger thumb and a bigger hit target for precise mouse drags. The Mounting toolbar popover lists every truss type, every base type, and a one-click Mount on nearest truss action. The keyboard reference is one F1 keystroke away (the in-app shortcut dialog is up to date with every binding).

For the deeper rabbit holes — collaboration locks, snapshot internals, RLS, the migration tool architecture — the FAQs cover the most-asked questions and link out to the per-page docs.

What’s gone or changed

A handful of features from the previous Mapping Matter don’t carry over verbatim. The modern editor handles them differently:

Viewer-only links are replaced by snapshot link shares — anonymous, optionally password-protected, revocable, with view counts. See Share a snapshot.
The always-on 1000 mm grid snap is now an opt-in Grid mode in the Snap popover; the default is Off. Pick Grid explicitly if you want the legacy behaviour back.
The Save button is gone. Auto-save runs continuously and the Revisions panel is the rollback path.
Per-file scenes are now one scene per Disguise Cloud project — switch projects from the launcher dashboard to work on a different scene.
The “last 10 opens” snapshot system is replaced by an unlimited revision history and named locked snapshots.

Where to start

A suggested first session:

Open a demo scene from the launcher’s Demos tab — Demo 5 - Mesh Luminance is the most analysis-rich.
Toggle the Lux, Pixels and Acuity buttons in the toolbar’s display cluster to see the analysis overlays.
Drop a custom projector via + Create custom and watch the AI suggestion banner populate.
Open the Snap popover and try Vertex or Surface while dragging a projector.
Publish a snapshot from the Publish & Share button and open the resulting link in a fresh window.

When you’re ready to bring your own work across, the Migratable tab in the launcher walks each legacy scene through the migration. The original stays untouched unless you opt in to marking it as migrated.