Lost beams

lanternz · Post by **lanternz** » Thu Feb 11, 2016 1:51 am

Am I doing something wrong? I needed a new LED moving light (SL180 wash). I duplicated a Mac Aura, modified the name, wattage, beam size and weight of the duplicated instrument and then replaced the Auras with the new instrument. No other attributes were changed. Now there is no beam image for the new instrument, the existing beam info from the Aura's seems to have gone and been replaced by some nonsense numbers (x -22m which is way off the drawing), the focus height reset itself to 37m!! The old Aura symbol still works correctly and displays it's beam etc.

Post by **admin** » Thu Feb 11, 2016 3:02 pm

There is probably nothing wrong. There is a conversion from Pan/Tilt to x,y,z and back. Sometimes, especially at oblique angles, a conversion from P/T to x,y,z will look strange if looking at the resulting x,y,z coordinates. However, you will see that the light does indeed pass through that point given the pan and tilt settings.

Try setting the pan and tilt to 50% (neutral straight down) and then set the Focus Height to 0.

lanternz · Post by **lanternz** » Fri Feb 12, 2016 11:50 pm

I don't see the beam in the front or side section views either. I tried setting the focus to straight down and the focus height to zero but this does not work either. I tried directly setting pan and tilt to 50/50 and that did not work and curiously this process then set the focus height to 0.96m. This 50/50 also sets the focus points incorrectly - x is about +1.54 from rig position and y is about +1.4. When the focus is set to straight down and the focus height to zero the instrument returns pan value as 18.44536958690955 and tilt value as 139.132021180843. And all I really did was duplicate an Aura and change it's name, weight and beam angle so the key came out correctly.

Post by **admin** » Sat Feb 13, 2016 5:22 am

Can you e-mail the plot? I can't seem to duplicate any of what you describe.

lanternz · Post by **lanternz** » Sat Feb 13, 2016 7:15 am

On it's way with original Aura added to drawing beside modified SL180 wash

Post by **admin** » Sat Feb 13, 2016 2:51 pm

On a quick look, the new symbol appears to be working correctly. There are two points that might cause confusion.

First, all the LED values are set to 0. As with a real fixture, setting the intensity and not any of the RGBW channels will result in no light. In both the Info table and the Beams tab, LED intensities are 0-100%.

The other confusion is that in the Info table, pan and tilt are expressed in degrees. In the Beams tab, pan and tilt are expressed as a DMX percentage and are translated into degrees using the Device Addresses table in the Entry info sheet. Some devices tilt 270 degrees, some closer to 300. That range is defined in the table. For most, a DMX of 50% translates to a tilt of 0% or straight down (assuming the fixture is hanging not upright). Pan varies more widely but the same principle applies.

In the plot, the Aura is pointing down. The pan and tilt values in the Info table are zero. The SL180 has pan and tilt values of 50 degrees. So, it is not pointing straight down.

lanternz · Post by **lanternz** » Sat Feb 13, 2016 11:05 pm

OK. Seems to work now with the RGBW values deleted. I was sure I had tried that but maybe it still had other glitches. Why did the duplicated instrument set it's RGBW values to zero when the Aura from which it was copied had no values set. Thanks for the clarification about degrees on the pan and tilt but again I am not sure why this should have changed. I am quite sure that all I changed on the duplicated instrument was it's name, it's slightly different beam range and it's weight. I assumed that all the other parameters would stay the same. For the purposes of this drawing the fine detail of fixture parameters did not matter so much, I was just trying to avoid the issue of the crew opening the road cases and calling me in the middle of the night to tell me they had been sent Showline 180s and not Auras!

Post by **admin** » Sun Feb 14, 2016 3:47 am

The issue might be a behavior where the default is for an LED fixture to have a white beam until a value for one of the device mix fields changes. (This might happen when switching the key entry or in other ways). The when/why is not as important as the effect:

Beyond the default, the info values for the individual colors are used to determine the color of the beam. If the result of the mix is black, the beam is not displayed. This would remain true, even if the color value was deleted and all the values were blank. (blank values would compute to zero resulting in black or no beam).

The latest build adds a check for blank values so that any time all the mix values are blank, the beam will return to the white default.

The difficulty here is for LEDs to simulate properly when DMX levels are used. And, also behave like a conventional light when all you really want is a beam displayed and you don't care about the color mix (in this case, the beam properly disappearing when all the color values are zero in undesirable).

lanternz · Post by **lanternz** » Mon Feb 15, 2016 1:59 am

Perhaps a "home" and a "clear" function in the beam scripts. Home is there already in the "set focus to down" function, clear could remove all beam functions - LED mixes etc, so "create beam" simply gives intensity to the instrument.