For purposes of designing a show, you may not need a perfect simulation of a cake that you are planning on using.  That's a good thing because if your cake is a consumer cake with a name like Galactic Gladiator, you may not have much to go on to make a VDL description.  Luckily, VDL makes it easy to create a simple "placeholder" cake simulation using whatever information you do have, which is often enough for designing a show. An example of a simple cake VDL description is, 30mm 49 Shot 10s Time Rain Comet Cake Z-Shape To put a description like this together, start with the size, then number of shots, then the duration, then the primary effect in the cake, then the word "Cake" and then the firing pattern (or leave the firing pattern blank if it is just straight up).  Optionally, you can include the prefire and the height, as in, 30mm 49 Shot 10s 2.1s PFT 90m Multi-Color Peony Cake Z-Shape You can try out the simulation from the menu item, "Effects > Create effect".  Type everything into the input box, and look at the green boxes to see if the software is interpreting the information correctly.   Figure 1 – Creating an effect from "File > Create effect" (or control-G)   If you are using the Hobbyist or Pro version of Finale 3D, you have the option of importing your effects from a CSV file.  In this case, the size, duration, height, and prefire (but not the number of shots) can be split off into separate columns in your CSV.  The software will automatically incorporate these metrics from separate columns into the created simulation, or will pull them out of the VDL or Description columns, or use defaults, if the separate columns for the metrics don't exist in your CSV.  Thus in a CSV file, if the metrics are in separate columns then the descriptions look a little simpler, like: 49 Shot Multi-Color Peony Cake Z-Shape Table 1 provides guidance for the format of the optional metrics of a cake. Table 1 – Basic cake metrics Term Format Example Size The caliber of the effect, followed by "mm" or double quote or the word "inches" 3" or 75mm Number of shots The number of shots, followed by the word "Shot"; if the number of shots is 10 or less, then the cake is considered a single row slice cake; optionally you can also specify the number of rows by adding "N Rows" after the word cake, where N is the number of rows 10 Shot Duration For cakes, the duration is from first shot to last break, in seconds.  The format is a number, followed by the character "s" or the word "seconds" 10s or 2.5s Height Meters The lift height in meters, followed by "m" 90m Prefire If prefire < 0.5, it specifies the "delay before simulation"; if prefire >= 0.5, is specifies the lift time for aerial shells; the format is a number, followed by "s" followed by "PFT" with a space after the "s" 2.3s PFT Firing pattern The firing pattern can be left blank for straight up shots, or can be one of these words: Z-Shape, X-Shape, Fan, or FNR; FNR means "fan to the right in sequence", in contrast to "fan" which implies simultaneous shots on each row Fan Some types of effects used in a cake could be single rising effects or shells.  For example, does a 50mm Crossette Cake shoot crossette stars or shells containing crossette stars?  In general, VDL interprets ambiguous effect descriptions in cakes as rising effects instead of shells.  You can explicitly change the description to be a shell by adding the word "Shell" or "Aerial" to the description, as in, 50mm 10 Shot Aerial Time Rain Cake which shoots 10 shells, as opposed to, 50mm 10 Shot Time Rain Cake which shoots 10 comets. VDL is capable of representing complex cake descriptions, including cakes that have multiple types of effects, and rows with different firing patterns and timings.  The basic parameters described in Table 1, though, are usually enough to create a cake simulation that adequate for scripting.

In Finale 3D, the angles of effects are represented as three numbers: pan, tilt, and spin.  Of the many possible ways to represent angles, Finale 3D chooses this representation because the three numbers, pan, tilt, and spin, correspond directly to the three degrees of freedom of a moving head light fixture.  If you ever forget what pan, tilt, and spin mean, you can just imagine a moving head light fixture in the orientation of Figure 1, and the meanings of the angles will pop out as the only possibilities. It bears mentioning here that positions in the scene (pyro launch positions and DMX fixtures) use a different representation for their angles that is more natural for their orientations (heading, pitch, and roll).  The positions' angle representation is described in Positions coordinate system. For fireworks effects, the three angles of a moving head light fixture may seem excessive.  A fireworks show whose effects are either aiming straight up or tilting left and right would only need one angle.  But if effects can also tilt forward toward the audience then a second angle is required.  If the show contains cakes that can be flipped around to face the opposite direction then a third angle is required.  So while one angle is enough for many kinds of fireworks shows, it takes three angles to cover all the possibilities, even for fireworks. Figure 1 – To understand pan, tilt and spin, imagine a moving head light fixture.   Pan, tilt, and spin The picture in Figure 1 is the image to have in mind for the definitions of pan, tilt, and spin, even if what you care about is fireworks.  The moving head light fixture has three degrees of freedom, which correspond to the pan, tilt and spin. With pan, tilt, and spin all being zero, the head of fixture and thus its beam direction aim straight up, as in Figure 1.  The head is mounted in a U-shaped yoke on an axis that enables the head to rotate forward toward the viewer by the tilt.  With angles being zero the U-shaped yoke is facing the viewer.  The yoke itself is mounted on a base plate in a fashion that enables it to rotate on the plate by the pan to face different directions, toward the viewer, to the side, etc. Although it isn't visible in Figure 1, the head may contain a stencil pattern internally, through which the light beam shines to make a pattern like the Batman logo that is projected into the clouds on television.  The stencil, which is called a "gobo", can rotate by the spin.   You can easily imagine the projected Batman logo spinning in the clouds, and you connect that image to the rotating gobo in the light head. With the mechanical model of Figure 1 firmly in mind, you can relate the definitions of pan, tilt, and spin to the three possible rotations of the moving head fixture: Pan is the rotation on the base. Tilt is the rotation in the yoke. Spin is the rotation around beam axis.   "Right Hand Rule" All three of these rotations follow the "Right Hand Rule" to resolve whether positive angle rotations are clockwise or counter-clockwise.  The Right Hand Rule states that if you hold your right hand out with your thumb aiming in the direction of the axis of rotation, then your fingers will curl in the direction corresponding to a positive angle.  Following this convention, pan rotates the yoke around to the right, counter-clockwise as seen from above.  Tilt rotates the head toward the viewer.   Spin rotates Batman logo on the beam to the right, counter clockwise.   Table 1 – Order of Euler Angle rotations producing a rotated vector v' from vector v v' = v * R1 * R2 * R3 Rotation First rotation (R1) Rotate around global Y-axis by spin Second rotation (R2) Rotate around global X-axis by tilt Third rotation (R3) Rotate around global Y-axis by pan   As you can see, the order of the three rotations matters to their definition.  Spin and pan are actually rotations around the same global Y-axis, differing only by which one is the first rotation and which one is the last rotation.  Referring back to the moving head light fixture of Figure 1, the order of rotations of Table 1 is the only possible choice that matches the physical constraints of the fixture.  If pan were the first rotation, for example, then tilting around the global X-axis wouldn't be possible because the yoke wouldn't necessarily be facing forward.   Table 2 – Range of angles in conversions from orientations Angle Range Pan (-180°, +180°] Tilt [0°, +180°] Spin (-180°, +180°]   Any orientation can be represented by pan, tilt, and spin angles in the ranges of Table 2.   Some orientations have multiple representations within these ranges that are equivalent.  If tilt is 0° then pan and spin do exactly the same thing!  Mathematically, in this Euler Angle representation all rotation sequences with tilt = 0° or 180° are equivalent to a rotation sequence in which +/- pan and spin sum to a constant value.  In circumstances in which an orientation is converted to a rotation sequence that is not uniquely defined, Finale 3D will choose the rotation sequence with spin = 0°, which creates a 1-to-1 relationship between orientations and Euler Angles in the ranges of Table 2.  These ranges are not limits, though, in Finale 3D's user interface and tables.  You can enter any pan, tilt and spin value into the script table columns, including numbers outside these ranges.   Orientations of pyro effects The firework example in Figure 2 is as simple as can be -- a comet effect is tilted 45 degrees to the right.  You might expect that an example like this would have pan = 0, tilt = 45, and spin = 0 since the tilt seems like the only rotation, but if you look again at Figure 1 you will remind yourself that when pan = 0 the tilt rotates toward the audience.  Thus, tilting an effect to the right requires pan = 90 to rotate the yoke shown in Figure 1 to face to the right, enabling the tilt to rotate the effect 45 degrees to the right instead of toward the audience.  Thus Figure 2 shows pan = 90, tilt = 45.  If you want to confirm the pan = 90 you can try this simple example yourself and then unhide the Pan column in the script window from the blue gear menu in the upper right.   Figure 2 – A comet or shell tilted 45 degrees to the right has pan = 90, tilt = 45, spin = anything.   Unlike the Batman logo in the moving head light example, the comet in Figure 2 is rotationally symmetric.  Spinning a comet around its beam axis doesn't make any difference, so the spin in Figure 2 can be anything.  That's not true for cakes with angles though, such as the fan cake shown in Figure 3.   Figure 3 – A tilted fan cake requires spin = -pan to face the audience while tilted, e.g.,  pan = 90, tilt = 45, spin -90.   Tilting a fan cake to the right requires all three angles -- pan, tilt, and spin.  The pan = 90 makes the yoke face the right, which is required for tilting it to the right.  Tilt = 45 tilts the cake to the right, same as in Figure 2.  But if spin is 0, the fan cake will still face the right, on account of the pan = 90.  Instead of the image of Figure 3, we'd be looking at the fan from the side, and the image would look more like Figure 2!  Setting spin = -pan returns the effect to face the audience while tilted.  The tutorial of Video 1 includes an example of a tilted cake.   Video 1 – Tutorial for pan, tilt, and spin