Directing the show

Once a scene is up and your cast is in it, the tabs across the top are your desk. You can reach any of them mid-show without interrupting anything.

Stage Map — moving people around#

The Stage Map is a top-down view of the scene you loaded, drawn from the scene itself rather than from a picture of it.

Pick a character, then click where you want them. Hovering shows you the route they'll take before you commit. The character walks there and the map updates as they go.

Some scenes have marked points of interest — a well, a door, a campfire. Those are clickable too.

The map is never on air. It's a working view for you, on its own camera. Moving somebody on the map moves them in the scene; it doesn't move any camera your audience is watching.

Cast Animations — making characters do things#

Pick a character and you get the animations that character can actually perform. The list is per character — a knight and a dragon don't share a vocabulary, so you're only ever offered things that will work.

Animations come in two kinds:

• One-shots play once and return to idle. Swing, cheer, point.
• Held animations stay on until you turn them off. They show as a toggle rather than a button.

Hotkeys#

You can bind a key to an animation, so the ones you use constantly don't need a click. Bind it once and it stays. One key drives one animation — binding a key that's already in use moves it.

Equipment#

Characters can hold things. Open the equipment control for a character and you'll see each place that character can hold something — usually hands — and what the current scene offers to put there.

A few things worth knowing:

• What's on offer comes from the scene. A scene with no props declares none, and the panel says so rather than looking broken.
• Not every character can hold things. Most creatures have nowhere to put a sword, and the panel says that too — it's a fact about the body, not a fault.
• It sticks. What somebody is carrying is remembered, so they keep it across a scene change.
• You can equip somebody before they're on stage. It's saved and applied when they arrive.

Cameras — cutting the show#

The Cameras tab has two pictures side by side, and understanding that is most of understanding the tab.

Each picture has its own set of controls underneath it, and those controls act on the picture above them. Framing a shot under Preview doesn't disturb what's on air.

When the preview shot is ready, the button on the preview pane puts it on air. The preview keeps its framing afterwards, so you can start building the next one straight away.

The controls#

Camera marks are the angles the scene author set up. They become buttons — press one and the camera goes there.

How it gets there is up to you: an instant cut, or a push over a few seconds. There's pan and orbit too.

The nudge pad trims the current shot a little at a time, with a sensitivity control so you can nudge gently or a lot.

Framing shortcuts point the camera at a particular character — head, or whole body — on the preview, so you can line up a close-up before taking it to air.

Auto hands the camera to an autopilot and takes it back again.

Weather — time of day and sky#

Scenes that support weather let you set:

• Time of day, with a dial showing where the sun and moon actually are
• Start and pause — freeze the clock at golden hour and leave it there
• How fast time runs
• The weather itself, from the list the scene offers

The most common reason to touch this: a scene that's too dark because the moon is behind a mountain. Move time of day forward and the problem goes away.

Everything here comes from the scene. A scene that offers no weather shows no weather controls — that's the scene being a clear-sky scene, not a fault.

Sound — music#

The Sound tab plays music beds under your show. You cue them; nothing starts on its own.

Music keeps playing while you move between tabs, so you can set a bed going and go back to directing.

Voices don't come through BobbleHub. Your table talks on Discord, and OBS picks that up alongside the picture — see Getting the show into OBS.

Output — looking at your own show#

The Output tab is a big view of either the programme or the preview.

It exists so you can look at what's going out without raising the show engine's window. Mid-show, bringing that window up is exactly what you don't want to do.

Troubleshooting#

A character won't perform an animation I expect them to have#

The list is per character, and different characters have genuinely different vocabularies. If an animation isn't offered for that character, it isn't available for them — it's not hidden behind a setting.

I pressed a camera button and the wrong picture changed#

Each set of controls belongs to the picture above it. The deck under Preview moves the preview; the deck under Programme moves what's on air. If air moved when you didn't want it to, you were on the right-hand deck.

The preview pane is dark#

The pane tells you why rather than just sitting black. If it says nothing is arriving, the show engine may not be publishing a preview yet — check the connection pills at the top of the window.

The weather tab is empty#

That scene doesn't offer weather. A scene declares what it has, and BobbleHub shows exactly that.

Moving somebody on the Stage Map does nothing#

Check a character is selected first — the map needs to know who you're moving. If the character is mid-walk, they'll finish that move first.

The equipment panel says there's no catalogue#

That scene doesn't include props. It's a normal state for a scene built without them.