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Spectrum (Bally 1981)

First-time toolkit learner build with practical troubleshooting discoveries and workflow insights. Notable for halftone dot artwork technique, insert split mode documentation, and movable object checklist. Built by apophis79, cyberpez, and sixtoe.

Table-Specific Details

Art & Visuals

  • Halftone dot technique in Photoshop for plastic artwork recreation: make grey swatch (value determines dot size/spacing), apply Color Halftone filter with all angles at 45 degrees, add color overlay layer with blend mode cycling. For multiple colors, duplicate dot layer and invert.
  • Opaque star inserts: increase material roughness and flatten the 3D insert bake target cup to be flush with the playfield instead of the default concave cup shape.
  • Movable object checklist: all movables need "Hide from Others" checked (except standup targets), spinners/gates need "Use Obj Pos" for correct rotation, Y-axis must be perpendicular to target face for standups.
  • Toolkit max lights must be set to 12-16, not 0 (unlimited). Unlimited causes GPU out-of-memory errors during batch renders even on a 4070 with 64GB system RAM.

Known Issues

  • Insert collection lightmapper property must be set to "Split" (not "Merge") for individually addressable insert lightmaps. Easy to miss in Blender's outliner -- requires re-running group and render steps.
  • Without a playfield_mesh primitive (set to invisible), VPX displays its default playfield plane which z-fights with toolkit lightmaps.
  • VLM.Results must be deleted before re-running batch meshes step, or errors like 'Curve' object has no attribute 'validate' occur.
  • Tony McMapFace tonemapper can produce completely black output in VR on certain tables (Spectrum and Beat the Clock confirmed). Reinhard and Filmic work correctly. May relate to tables with low maximum object heights.

Techniques Developed Here

See Also