jchuchla
Supporting Member
After years of planning and many months of work, we’re finally nearing completion on adding support for moving heads and other DMX type intelligent lighting fixtures to Vixen. We took the approach of making it as universal as possible so that it supports all kinds of fixtures, while at the same time, adding specific functionality to make using the most common types more simple. This supports everything from moving head fixtures, to moving mirror fixtures, to non-moving DMX floods. You can even use it to control other DMX things like fog and snow machines, or even lasers.
While the whole team has had extensive input and collaboration on this project, most of the work was done by John Baur. So, a big thanks goes out to him for the hundreds of hours he’s put into this.
The basic premise is that you’ll add a fixture via display setup (or preview setup). This is represented as a single element (one sequencer row) in Vixen. The fixture will get properties that define what its functions are, and where those functions map to its DMX channels. Functions are things like Pan, Tilt, Gobo, Strobe, etc… We’ve also included the ability to automate certain functions such as opening the shutter whenever you set a color.
There’s a new collection of effects designed for these fixtures. You’ll control the fixture’s function by stacking effects on the element to achieve your desired results. For example, you can set the position with the pan/tilt effect and control the color via the standard pulse or set level effects. You might stagger the effect start times so that the fixture’s motors have time to move into the starting position before setting the color.
We’ve run a beta test period with select testers and have progressed through 8 versions to get to this point that is now rather stable. So we feel that it’s now time to merge it into the main project. The new functionality will begin to appear in the dev builds over the next week or so. We elected to delay this until after our major releases this year to ensure that our users have a stable release to use for this season. Now that we’ve hit this point on the release channel with 3.9u3, and the fixture project is rather stable, we’re going to bring them together. Dev builds moving forward will include the fixture branch. And as a result, any subsequent release builds that may come out (3.9u4?) will also include it.
Stay tuned for further announcements with videos about these new features.
As always, we want to hear your feedback. If you find any bugs or problems, please open a ticket at bugs.vixenlights.com.
While the whole team has had extensive input and collaboration on this project, most of the work was done by John Baur. So, a big thanks goes out to him for the hundreds of hours he’s put into this.
The basic premise is that you’ll add a fixture via display setup (or preview setup). This is represented as a single element (one sequencer row) in Vixen. The fixture will get properties that define what its functions are, and where those functions map to its DMX channels. Functions are things like Pan, Tilt, Gobo, Strobe, etc… We’ve also included the ability to automate certain functions such as opening the shutter whenever you set a color.
There’s a new collection of effects designed for these fixtures. You’ll control the fixture’s function by stacking effects on the element to achieve your desired results. For example, you can set the position with the pan/tilt effect and control the color via the standard pulse or set level effects. You might stagger the effect start times so that the fixture’s motors have time to move into the starting position before setting the color.
We’ve run a beta test period with select testers and have progressed through 8 versions to get to this point that is now rather stable. So we feel that it’s now time to merge it into the main project. The new functionality will begin to appear in the dev builds over the next week or so. We elected to delay this until after our major releases this year to ensure that our users have a stable release to use for this season. Now that we’ve hit this point on the release channel with 3.9u3, and the fixture project is rather stable, we’re going to bring them together. Dev builds moving forward will include the fixture branch. And as a result, any subsequent release builds that may come out (3.9u4?) will also include it.
Stay tuned for further announcements with videos about these new features.
As always, we want to hear your feedback. If you find any bugs or problems, please open a ticket at bugs.vixenlights.com.