color black on gradient?

jchuchla

jchuchla

Supporting Member
I can't seem to enter a color black (0,0,0) when doing a color gradient. I'm not sure if this is a bug, or if i'm going about this the wrong way. Say i want to do a chase that starts as red, then fades thru black to green. I can't seem to make that intermediate color black. every time i try to type zeros in the RGB boxes, it makes another value 255.

This color picker is a bit confusing to me. I like all the options, but im not really sure what the radio buttons by H S R G B are for and what they actually mean.
 
nope, i cant get that either. every time i enter a number, one of the other numbers jump. I can't really figure out the patter, but direct color entry is definately not working. and even on the color picker raster, when i drag to the corner that looks black, it gives jumps to white instead.
 
For a lighting value, the data is split into two components -- the color of the light, and the intensity (brightness) of the light. These are set up in two different sections: for the color, you set it up in the color gradient bit, and the value is set up in a curve.

Because of this, the color entry form has been modified to only let you set TWO of the color components -- hue and saturation -- but not brightness/intensity. That's why you are unable to set a black -- because it has an effective brightness of 0, and the point of the color picker is to set the color, not the brightness.

So, to achieve what you're trying to do, set up the color to be a gradient from red to green..... then set up the curve for the item to be a line representing the brightness you want. (eg. it might be full at the start, down to 0 at 50%, then full again at the end).

(Alternatively, you could do two separate pulses: one red, from 100% - 0%, and one green, from 0% to 100%, and overlap them.)
 
That makes sense. But I have to ask, why did you do it that way? It seems like you went thru extra work to disable the intensity control. Why couldn't you have left it and let them both the color control and the intensity controls affect the brightness? You must have a rhyme to your reason.
 
jchuchla said:
That makes sense. But I have to ask, why did you do it that way? It seems like you went thru extra work to disable the intensity control. Why couldn't you have left it and let them both the color control and the intensity controls affect the brightness? You must have a rhyme to your reason.
Click to expand...

Yes, this was a difficult one to figure out how to get it work work nicely for all situations, and this was the best we could come up with.

The problem is that there's a lot of different cases it could be used for, and to be flexible, the best way would be to split up the color from the intensity. For example, there might be some channels that are patched through to outputs that aren't RGB: they might be static, single-color strings -- in which case, they don't actually USE the color component of the lighting value, they just use the intensity directly. So you might set up a color to go through black, but leave intensity at 100%, and expect it to fade: but if it's patched to some simple lights (ie. value only), it would stay 100% the whole time.

Additionally, it allows us more flexibility for filtering and combination of things later on; there's no filters implemented yet, but we've thought through the ability to do sequence-level filtering for things, to do stuff like "fade out all channels over time", or "change all channels to red", etc. This makes that part a lot easier.
 
I can see your approach. Though it does seem like its going to cause a lot of confusion. Maybe I just need to play with it more.
So does that mean any rgb color is going to always have one color component at 100% and the other two components are some value less? So to get my dark Halloween purple (16,0,32) I need to set blue to 100%(255) red to 50%(128) and intensity to 6.2%(16d)?


--Jon Chuchla--

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
jchuchla said:
So does that mean any rgb color is going to always have one color component at 100% and the other two components are some value less? So to get my dark Halloween purple (16,0,32) I need to set blue to 100%(255) red to 50%(128) and intensity to 6.2%(16d)?
Click to expand...

the color should be thought of in terms of hue, saturation, and brightness -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV has good info on it. It's basically a different color model -- instead of specifying the amount of light in each color component (RGB), you pick a 'hue' of color (green, purple, yellow, etc.), pick the 'saturation' (eg. faded and greyish, or really vivid and intense), and how bright.

The reason I say this is because then the brightness (the L in HSL) conveniently maps directly to the brightness in the curve that you specify. This is why we can lock one of the values -- the L -- and use the color picker to specify the H and S.

Of course you can still use the RGB boxes to directly enter an RGB color, but you'll just have the same problem you had originally -- some values aren't valid (because they all need to be 100% brightness), and so it will change the values on you. That's why I personally find it easier to pick from the color mapper.
 
Well you're doing all the hard work so ill roll with it. I'm sure ill get used to it. It might make things easier though if the color picker gradient window were much bigger(or sizable). It's quite small on my screen and hard to navigate.


--Jon Chuchla--

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
jchuchla said:
Well you're doing all the hard work so ill roll with it. I'm sure ill get used to it. It might make things easier though if the color picker gradient window were much bigger(or sizable). It's quite small on my screen and hard to navigate.
Click to expand...

good point! can you submit a feature request in the bugtracker? (bugs.vixenlights.com). That'll help us keep it in mind and scedule the work sometime next year.

Actually, could you also make a ticket requesting the ability to not have the color locked/forced to 100% brightness? I've been thinking about it, and considering adding a mode where people can elect to specify the brightness in the color picker as well. It won't work nicely with some things, but at least people will have the option.
 
sallz0r said:
Yes, this was a difficult one to figure out how to get it work work nicely for all situations, and this was the best we could come up with.

The problem is that there's a lot of different cases it could be used for, and to be flexible, the best way would be to split up the color from the intensity. For example, there might be some channels that are patched through to outputs that aren't RGB: they might be static, single-color strings -- in which case, they don't actually USE the color component of the lighting value, they just use the intensity directly.
Click to expand...

You're welcome to use the Color Chooser from FxGen and the Grid Editor if you would like. It provides both R/G/B and H/S/B models and maps between them, so the user can work with whichever model they want (with sliders or visual markers):
ColorChooser.jpg

This is a separate DLL now so it can be called from other places. It was from an MSDN article from by Ken Getz, July 2003, and I just wrapped it as a .NET assembly.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164113.aspx

don
 
Don
How would I go about using this alternate picker?


--Jon Chuchla--

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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