WYSIWYG pairs CAD drafting with lighting preview in one program

The picture

WYSIWYG is lighting and production-design software made by CAST Software, a company based in Toronto, Canada. The vendor's own product page describes it as combining CAD drafting, plots, equipment data, real-time visualization and virtual show control in one application, and calls it, in the company's own words, the definitive entertainment industry software for production design. The company's homepage lists the current release as WYSIWYG 2026 and describes an integrated CAD library used to build lighting plots. Trade sources describe WYSIWYG as predating the current wave of real-time game engines used for previs by roughly two decades; neither of the vendor's own pages checked for this entry states a specific first-release year, so no founding date is asserted here.

What the documents show

CAST's own materials establish a specific product structure rather than a history. WYSIWYG ships in three tiers: Perform and Perform Lite add console connectivity through Art-Net, sACN and manufacturer-specific drivers, with Perform Lite capped at ten DMX universes; Design offers the CAD and visualization tools without console connectivity; and Core is described as a documentation-focused entry tier for patching and paperwork. The vendor states the software's library holds more than eight thousand fixtures, which is the vendor's own figure and has not been checked here against an independent count. The page also states that automated plot and patch documents are generated from the same drafted data, which is a claim about workflow efficiency rather than a claim about photometric accuracy.

What it is allowed to decide

Based only on what CAST's own pages state, WYSIWYG can plausibly support decision class 5, technical execution, since its console connectivity and patch generation are described as feeding directly into a show's physical control system rather than only into a presentation. It holds Auditability in a documentation sense: a plot and its associated schedules are structured, exportable records. The vendor's pages do not state that the software's fixture library is verified against manufacturer photometric data as a matter of routine, so Photometric authority is not established here; that would depend on which specific fixture profile a designer has loaded, the same dependency documented for other tools in this batch.

The disclosure label

A disclosure for a WYSIWYG-built lighting plot, dated 16 September 2026 and asserted by the lighting designer who built it, would read: this is a class 5 technical-execution document generated in WYSIWYG; it holds Auditability, since the plot, patch and schedule are structured records; it does NOT HOLD confirmed Photometric authority independent of the specific fixture profiles loaded for this production.

• Does the fixture library entry match the exact model and lamp or LED engine on the rig, not just the manufacturer name?
• Is the eight-thousand-fixture figure being treated as a library size or as a guarantee of accuracy for any one of them?
• Which tier produced this document, and does that tier connect to a live console or only to a preview?

A plot generated in Design and one generated in Perform can look the same on paper; only the tier and the fixture data behind it say whether the document has ever touched a live rig.