Hi Roger. I’m glad you found the pro line effects you were looking for! Though as you’ve seen, the current selection of consumer-focused cakes is much smaller than the pro line and generic effects and doesn’t include most of what you’re looking for. We recognize the growing demand for consumer cake catalogs, and adding a larger selection of product sims (including consumer items) is something we’re actively working to accomplish.   Are there specific consumer cakes that are highest priority for you, that you’d really like to see included in the Finale 3D library? I can’t say when or if any specific items will be added to included supplier catalogs, but as someone with an interest in this area, I like to know which items people need the most.   There isn’t currently a way to directly import your WikiFireworks library into Finale 3D, but you can create your own custom effects in Finale 3D to represent the cakes you have. This will allow you to build your shows using the consumer cakes you have in your inventory, but it does take a little time to create each effect within Finale 3D. You can make new effect sims as simple or detailed as you want, but to give you an idea of what I mean, here’s an example of a very basic placeholder cake, created using Finale 3D’s “Visual Descriptive Language” (VDL), that can be made in just a few seconds in Finale 3D:   20mm 49 shot 60s placeholder cake   This example could be seen as the most basic form of a placeholder cake, designed after the ‘High Falutin’ cake from Brothers (using the tube size, shot count, and timing, but ignoring the actual firework effects to save time now). With more time, you could define the effects used in the cake, the tube arrangements, and even the firing patterns to more accurately represent the cakes you have in your inventory, but even these simple placeholders can allow you to build your shows using effects in the timeline that represent accurate shot counts and durations you’ve specified, with very little time investment.   To create a cake like that, open Finale 3D, log in, and then once you’re in the main window, click “Effect” in the top menu, then “Create Effect”. From there, you can type your firework effect or cake description into the “Visual Description (full VDL)” field, give the item a name in the “Name for effect” field, then click “Enter” to save your newly created effect to your “My Effects” list (which appears in the catalogs dropdown like any other effects catalog). From there, you can select the effect from your “My Effects” list and drop it into your show timeline, just like any other effect from the Finale 3D catalogs. See this great Help Center article for more details on creating simple placeholder cakes in Finale 3D.   Hopefully this helps! Neil

For many years now, I have been using Cobra Show Creator with Wikifireworks to build my pyro-musicals using Brothers Pyrotechnics and Pyro-King wholesale consumer cakes.   I just bought Finale 3D to help me add Pro-line effects to my show.   I am pleased to find all my Pro-line effect catalogs.  However, I am VERY disappointed to not find any of my consumer fireworks libraries (mainly Brothers Pyrotechnics and Pyro-King).  I am new to Finale 3D and this forum, but I can’t find any mention of this issue in any of my forum searches.   Please forgive me if this is an issue that has been covered extensively, but can someone point me in the right direction on how to get my WikiFireworks library supported in Finale 3D?   Thank you! Roger

Hi Community!  I am Roger from Ferndale, WA. and have been a pyro addict most of my life.   I do one show a year (guess the date), and as I am sure you all know, it gets bigger and better each year!  I did my first pyro-musical in 2014, but now with all the Pro-line effects, I can no longer visualize it all in my head.  So, this is my venture into Finale 3D.  I can’t wait.

Hi Will, as described by Ulf Werner it is more easier than expected as is enough to only get a different effect duration on the output file. I can confirm this works.   Thank you Ulf Werner, so according to your suggestion I need to copy the effect to my library many times (for each duration) and just modify effect duration to get things working?

Hey guys, will and i talked about it long time ago. It works just with the right duration which you assigned to the effect in your F3d library. In the moment where you import a shw file into autoshow creator of explo and setting up the “box nr”(rail) as a wave flame, the software recognize the imported duration and assign the small letter into the ignition group column automatically.   Will maybe we could talk to explo to use the hazard column for it. As the ignition group column where explo write this small letter to recognize the right duration for the flame output is for the normal receivers that what you mean normally with the hazard column. We are able do use this to deactivate lines by the small letter which we assigned to them. Explo allows only values from a-z in this column. As in F3d there is no limitation for this column we could make a warning dialog for the “export firing system script file” dialog where the user will get a warning if there is a value which isnt “a-z” before the export starts. If you agree i will try to force explo to implement recognizing this column during importing shw file into the autoshow creator software.   KR  

Hello Pyroteo,   I remember the Explo firing system having this capability, but if I remember correctly there was some problem with it. I can’t remember if the problem was just a difficulty or a show stopper. The conclusion I had reached at the time was that the group/duration information was not represented in the SHW file and therefore external software like Finale had no way to export it. That conclusion may have been incorrect, or the situation may have changed since then. That was a long time ago.   1) Look at the definition of the SHW file in https://finale3d.com/documentation/explo-script-file-format/   2) Try exporting a test file from Finale and then modifying the SHW file by hand with a text editor to achieve the duration specifications that you want, and test to make sure the modified SHW file achieves the result you want with the actual fixture.   3) If you are successful with (2), then it is likely we could provide a way to control and export the information you entered manually from Finale, within the app.   Will

Thank you so much DrewFinale, you can also download “Explo X2 Autoshow” tool (from https://www.explo.at/en/software/pc-ansteuerung/x2-autoshow.html) adding a new line (e.g. BOX 1 CH 8), then right click on “Option” cell and set device as “Liquid” (this means X2-Wave) and trying to set a group value you can see opening times changing. This is also for macros (e.g. CH31).  

Hi PyroTeo, I didn’t know this was possible using the Explo firing system. We’ll look into it and follow up soon.

Hey Jenca,   Vulcan isn’t shipping very much product, so there isn’t much demand for their sims. If you any have trouble creating specific effects, post them here and we’ll give you a hand.

  Walker Pyrotechnics wrote: Has there been any updates on this? Will we be seeing new consumer cakes in our catalogs soon?   Yes, we recently published simulations hundreds of new Racoon and Wizard items. At this moment we are working on Fire Factory and Great Grizzly. Next we plan to make major improvements to the Spirit of 76 and Dominator catalogs.