Hi! A little background: I’m currently using touchdesigner to map video content to our auditorium’s LED Fixtures, controlled by an EOS Ion XE lighting console.
To do this, I’ve created grids with the number of pixels in each of our fixture groups (EX: we have 2 rows of 6 cyc lights with 3 pixels each, so the grid has 2 rows and 18 columns). These cyc fixtures have 33 channels with RGBAM (red, green, blue, amber mint) led emitters, so I’m only looking to control the RGB emitters, which receive RGB data from a Lookup Texture.
In the DMX Fixture POP, I manually created a routing table to specifically control only the RGB emitters, which are channels 3, 5, and 7 within the 33 channel cyc fixture. These cyc fixtures are mapped in our lighting console within two different universes (5 and 7). This process works great, and the visualizer within the DMX Fixture POP shows that the video content is correctly mapped to all the fixtures in our auditorium.
However, once the DMX Fixture POPs are connected to the DMX Out POP, the channels I manually specified are rearranged. Instead of having channels 3, 5, and 7 in order, the DMX Out POP maps them as 7, 8, and 9 (and this happens for all the fixtures). So it picks the last channel I’m using from that fixture (in this case the blue emitter) and adds the other two channels after. Data is being sent to the lighting board from TouchDesigner via sACN and that process works as expected. But since channels 7, 8, and 9 are being controlled (which is a blend of blue and amber emitters) the result looks, well, blue and amber.
How do I keep the specific channels from being changed by the DMX Out POP?
the routing table of the DMX POP is meant to set the starting address of a fixture, it does not allow for creating a dmx channel map.
Ideally you would set up the DMX Fixture POP to the spec of the CYC light you are using. This would mean replicating the DMX Channel setup that the CYC light uses in it’s 33 channel mode.
Most channels can be set to constant as you don’t want to control them while the RGB channels then can take their values from the Color attribute.
Could it be that the RGB values are 16bit? It sounds a bit like it as they are spaced apart by 1 channel.
Could you share the maker and model of the CYC light you are using?
@snaut We use Ovation Cyc 3FC fixtures. Each led emitter in the fixture has a channel for normal control and fine control. Is this what you mean by 16 bit?
correct - yes - when you see fine control than that usually means that the value is controlled by a 16bit value. With a DMX channel having a 8bit resolution (256 values), a 16 bit value is realized via a second channel.
For the Ovation CYC 3FC fixture in 33 channel mode, a DMX Fixture would take as a input geometry a 3 point line strip with at point attributes for color (covering the r, g, and b channels) as well as a float 2 point attribute for the extra amber and lime colors.
The Dimmer and Strobe channels would be realized via Primitive attributes and are set to constant here in the attached example which means they can be directly controlled via the DMX Fixture POP.
As the RGB and Amber Lime colors are for each light segment, but a DMX Channel only accepting a 4 float attribute, I added a DMX channel for RGB (‘RGBColor’) and a DMX channel for Amber and Lime (‘AmberLimeColor’) with the parameter Merge with Above Block enabled for the ‘AmberLimeColor’ channel. This way when looping over all input points, it will first setup the channels for red, green, and blue followed then by the amber lime colors.
The DMX Map then correctly shows the same addressing as in the fixtures DMX chart:
