What the audience sees is the smallest part.

An opera house stage cut in half, based on the Teatro Real in Madrid. Find the parts of the stage house, fly the scenery, move the platforms and wagons, hide the machinery from every seat and plan a scene change.

STAGE

3D Viewport

Section Sightlines Seat view

Seat

LMB select · MMB orbit · Shift MMB pan · Wheel zoom

LMBSelectGMove along its track0–9Type the position (m)HomeFrame allCtrlZUndo

SAME KEYS AS BLENDER

Shortcuts you can use here

Keys work while the mouse is over the workspace. Every machine moves along one track only, like the real ones: bars and platforms up and down, legs and wagons sideways, the rear wagon forwards and back.

LMB: Select a piece (or a part of the building in the first step)
G: Move the selected piece along its track. Type a number for the exact position in metres (a bar: the height of its pipe). Click or Enter to confirm, Esc or right click to cancel.
MMB · ShiftMMB · Wheel: Orbit / pan / zoom the view (AltLMB also orbits)
Numpad 1 3 7 · Home: Front / side (section) / top view · frame all
CtrlZ: Undo · CtrlShiftZ redo

FROM THE LAB TO THE THEATRE

The Teatro Real in numbers

The lab simplifies the machinery of the Teatro Real (Madrid): fewer bars and platforms, the same ideas.

The stage is 2.54 m above the street. The stage house rises 47 levels above the ground and goes down to "cota -16", 24 m under the stage.
68 motorised bars of 20 m, parallel to the audience, lift up to 750 kg each (evenly spread). Point loads hang from 35 "puntos" of 150 kg and 40 "puntuales" of 250 kg.
The platforms of 18.20 × 3.5 m carry up to 24 t; four of them also move horizontally. A set of wagons has four units.
18 goods lifts of different kinds bring the scenery in: a typical set weighs 10–15 t, a heavy one up to 20 t.
In Blender: model the stage house to scale and put a camera at the eye height of the worst seats. The Camera view shows at once what the masking hides.