Methods for taking into account physical orientation of moving heads

Beam for Max
1

Before I get nerdy in max to solve this, I’m curious if there’s anything that addresses this:

moving head fixtures are often rigged in different orientations. Is there a way to define which orientation it is and then get the same movement of the fixtures?

2

You can adjust the way a 0.-1. modulation parameter value range is mapped to the 0-255 DMX channel range using the ranges key of a fixture object in the fixture patch.

// invert pan and tilt ranges of a fixture

"ranges": [
  {
    "name": "pan",
    "lower": 255,
    "upper": 0
  },
  {
    "name": "tilt",
    "lower": 255,
    "upper": 0
  }
]

If you open the Beam - Demo Set.sbp in a code editor, you can see some examples of that.

If you are not comfortable manually editing JSON, you can download Beam for Live and just use the application’s Fixture Patch editor to create a Fixture Patch with edited Ranges for specific moving heads, then load the .sbp into beam.core / beam.patcheditor. Beam for Max’s beam.patcheditor GUI abstraction doesn’t currently have a dedicated functionality to edit ranges.

3

Thanks, Luka! I’m slowly getting more familiar with these files, though my first impulse is always wasting time in max :wink:

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